“When that great ship went down”: A Titanic Playlist, Part 1
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“God, with power in His hand”
Sheet music cover (source: New York Public Library Digital Public Domain Collection)
Overarching these controversies, the hubris narrative played out within religious critiques of growing modernization and secularization. The disaster was a vehicle for popular unease with the pace of change, both technological and social. For many, the mighty ocean brought human invention low. It also brought God’s wrath down on an opulent, sinful, and implicitly effeminate lifestyle. Those passengers drinking at all hours, and playing cards and dancing on Sunday were cruising for a smiting.
Biel’s books describe a wide range of voices and media assessing the disaster and drawing meaning from it—journalistic, religious, artistic and musical, historical, and (re)creative. The mainstream press could not get enough of it. The African-American press largely ignored it. Some artists mourned the loss or celebrated the heroism, while others put forward alternative or subversive narratives, based on religious, racial, or class critiques. Biel argues:
“The Titanic disaster was historically not intrinsically meaningful. While we like to think that the disaster’s resonance is timeless—that it has to do with universal themes of humans against nature, hubris, false confidence, the mystery of the sea, hydrophobia, heroism, and cowardice—the Titanic seared itself into American memory not because it was timeless but because it was timely. Americans in 1912 made it speak to the concerns of contemporary politics, society, and culture. Although many of them claimed to have found trans-historical truths in the disaster, such claims were themselves historically grounded in their own present circumstances and ideological purposes. No more than any other event was the Titanic inherently memorable. Making rather than finding its significance, people worked and fought to shape how the disaster would, they hoped, be remembered.”
Biel goes on to describe how the Titanic figured in popular imagination over much of the ensuing century. Its resonance appears to revive in moments of great technological change—the early years of the Cold War and the 1990s, shortly after the discovery of Titanic’s wreckage and leading up to the creation of James Cameron’s blockbuster film.
Today’s post and the next will go through a select list of songs about the Titanic. For today, we’ll start with songs that emerged mostly from folk and blues traditions within a few years of the disaster. The next post will focus on songwriters raising the Titanic more than 60 years later.
Titanic Playlist, Part One:
“The Great Titanic (It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down)”
This song likely has the greatest cultural currency in the U.S. “The Great Titanic” has been a summer camp favorite for decades. My mother remembers that she and her siblings learned it in the late ’40s and early ’50s at a day camp. It was, for her, a terrifically fun song to sing. It never occurred to her until she was an adult that it was in any way morbid. The refrain does much of the song’s work:
“It was sad, it was sad
It was sad when that great ship went down
Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives
It was sad when that great ship went down.”
Cindy Hunter Morgan discussed “singing at an angle to content” in an earlier post on disaster songs. It’s difficult for me to think of a sharper angle than this song. Group singing and the repeated chorus bring an irresistible cheery dimension to the song, even though “it was sad.” The pathos of the song quickly pushes through to a kind of amusing absurdity in the context of group singing.
As far as the themes that Biel highlights, “The Great Titanic” brings forward the class dimensions of rich and poor, as well as the idea that the ship was in some measure an affront to divine sovereignty over human life and death. Biel presents lyrics to a version of the song as collected in Alabama in 1915.
William and Versey Smith recorded the song in Chicago in 1927 as “When That Great Ship Went Down.” Harry Smith included it as Track 22 on his iconic Anthology of American Folk Music. His characteristically pithy headline for it reads “MANUFACTURERS [sic] PROUD DREAM DESTROYED AT SHIPWRECK. SEGREGATED POOR DIE FIRST.”
You can find online versions of this song by Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Pete Seeger, and perhaps my favorite clip of it–a boozy, barroom version by The Gourds. Here is an un-aired archival clip of Roy Acuff singing it as part of the “Open House” TV show. Acuff introduces the song somewhat apologetically, but it’s difficult to keep spirits down.
Woody Guthrie’s performance of the song alters the refrain. His performance sounds very much like a fusion with “What Did the Deep Sea Say?”. He’s joined here by Cisco Houston and Sonny Terry on a 1944 recording.