<<<Back to page 1

“The Sinking of the Titanic”

Larry LeBlanc mentioned “The Great Titanic,” by the Stoneman Family, one of the variety of titles for the song with the refrain “it was sad when that great ship went down.” As Pat mentioned last week, we hope to dedicate a full post to songs about HMS Titanic, so we’ll leave this one here as a forecast of things to come. (Lyrics)

“Night Guard” and “Michael Conway”

Jon Doeringer and Tim Quan, respectively, recommended these two titles through us. “Night Guard,” by the late Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers, tells the tale of a former rodeo cowboy turned rancher who is forced by cattle rustlers to pick up a rifle to defend his livelihood. As with “Boll Weevil” last week, we see that disasters can take many shapes in posing such a threat. Sometimes it doesn’t matter whether the disaster is natural or artificial. (For more about “Night Guard,” see our post on Rogers’s “Harris and the Mare.”) Here’s the live performance from Rogers’s magnificent Home in Halifax. (Lyrics)

Quan’s recommendation of Solas‘s “Michael Conway” is also a song of a very personal kind of disaster. It comes early, as a harsh winter casts our hero away from his Irish home. Seeking his fortune in America, Conway makes a living in the West by way of his hands and his fists. As a miner, he works the copper vein in Butte, Montana. As a bareknuckle boxer, he gets betrayed and brought down. Here the song brings us back into familiar murder ballad territory. The performance by Mick McAauley and Solas is gorgeous–a reward for you who have stayed with us. The song was written by Solas founder, Seamus Eagan, based on a true story of his father’s great-uncle. It was the starting point for Solas’s 2012 release, Shamrock City.(Lyrics)

Disaster songs and murder ballads

I started writing this post a few hours after two people were shot outside a coffee shop across the street from my workplace. After the shots, and the few seconds it took to realize what I had heard, I looked down from my office window on an upper floor to see one victim lying in the street, explaining to police officers arriving on the scene what had happened and where the shooter had gone. This victim, the intended target of an apparently gang-related shooting, survived the attack. The second victim, a 49-year-old civil servant, did not. She was a bystander who had just left the shop with a cup of coffee at the end of her workday.

This episode, and my deadline for writing this post, drove home the thin boundary between murder ballads and disaster songs. Disasters come very big and very small. The songs, disaster songs or murder ballads, help make us aware that we are all in some respects that innocent bystander, and our innocence (real or imagined) doesn’t matter as much as we hope it might. We are also that displaced immigrant miner scrapping away to make a living, dependent on the decency of others. On the other hand, in the disaster songs, we are sometimes that heroic state trooper, the self-reliant rancher, or like the physician grandfather in last week’s “Halifax,” the one to bring healing and hope in disaster’s wake.

Thanks to you all for reading and listening. Special thanks again to all those who proposed songs.