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Let’s say you went away for the weekend and some massive catastrophe suddenly struck London. How are you likely to find out about it? If you happen to be within arm’s reach of any sort of telecommunications device, an alert is likely to come within minutes. By comparison, in the United States at the end of the 19th century, whether you lived in the industrialised North, the cosmopolitan East, frontier West or deep South, hard news was hard to come by and the channels of communication were few, sluggish and biased.

Despite those limitations, stories of violent epic struggle and tragedy did manage to sift through, particularly in the rural religious South, thanks to topical songs. These are celebrated on a new release, the remarkable People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938. Steady yourself for every kind of horrific event, great and small: air and rail crashes, lives lost at sea, mining disasters and conflagrations, floods and storms, ruthless murders and racy trials.

It was not unusual for topical songs to be written, recorded and released within days of the events they describe. Blind Alfred Reed, a prolific disaster-song composer, wrote his Wreck of the Westbound Airliner within days of the fatal crash, and his friend Fred Pendleton’s recording of the same event was finished in a week. Bob Miller’s The Crash of the Akron, (about a fatal pre-Hindenburg zeppelin accident) was written and recorded within one day of the incident. With turnaround times such as this, we can understand the forced rhymes and awkward phrasing often found in these tunes.

Things surely get no more instantaneous than the street-performance approach of John Carson, a fiddler. During the trial of Leo Frank (for the rape and murder of ‘little’ Mary Phagan), in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1912, Carson was an ever-present fixture on the steps of the court-house. Functioning as a sort of reporter/town crier/protest singer, he kept crowds enthralled with his song variations, unabashedly condemning Frank while providing up-dates on the legal proceedings within. That the innocent Jewish Frank was lynched by the KKK for a crime he didn’t commit may be in some part due to Carson’s one-sided musical harangues.

Blues giants such as Charley Patton and Furry Lewis also found fertile material. Patton’s High Water Everywhere is a more or less straightforward retelling of the Mississippi flood of 1927. Likewise with Lewis: his Kassie Jones tells the story of that tragic engineer Casey Jones.

Equally the white counterparts of Patton and Lewis, early Texas country stars such as Vernon Dalhart and Ernest Stoneman, pitched in.

Dalhart scored phenomenal success with The Death of Floyd Collins, recounting the tragic story of a cave explorer who died in 1925 after being trapped for two weeks in a Kentucky cave. It was arguably America’s first media spectacle, as attempts to rescue him had America glued to their wirelesses.

The song came about thanks to a record company executive, Polk Brockman. Realising there might be money in a song about the event, Brockman approached the Atlanta-based songwriter and blind evangelist Andrew Jenkins, who knocked off Trapped! The Death of . . . in an hour, with his stepdaughter, Irene Spain, arranging the music. They were paid $25. Brockman then took the song to Columbia who gave it to Dalhart. Three million sales later, Columbia had the biggest-selling country and western song ever on their hands and Jenkins probably wished he’d asked for a bit more money. Success was not always contingent on immediacy, however. Ernest Stoneman, an odd-job man and musican from Virginia, scored one of the biggest hits of the Twenties with The Sinking of the Titanic. For the whole decade, parlours and porches tapped out it’s chorus: “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.” Equally, Will Bennett’s 1929 hit Railroad Bill was inspired by the outlaw Morris Slater, a vinegar worker turned train robber shot in 1897.

These ballads are not just a rich archive for the American folklore heritage, later drawn on by the likes of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, but have proved to be a cornerstone of American popular song and all its subsequent movements, right up to rock‘n’roll.

It was in the embittered and cynical aftermath of the Sixties protest movements that the topical song’s ability to inspire or inflame Joe Public began to wane. The Boomtown Rats’ I Don’t Like Mondays (inspired by a 16-year-old’s excuse for firing on children in a school playground) was a rare example that captured the imagination of listeners.

Although such methods of songwriting have become increasingly unfashionable, every now and then a momentous event spurs artists to revive the tradition of commemorative song. The World Trade Centre attacks spawned a host of patriotic outbursts and turgid ballads masquerading as stirring tributes. Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans inspired a much more sincere level of musical memorialising, as one would hope and expect for a city that has brought so much beautiful music into the world. Yet none measure up to Memphis Minnie’s When the Levee Breaks, a peculiar ditty from a bygone era.

How very odd and sad that in a world obsessed with and consumed by self-reflective “reality” entertainment, there is no longer a market for inspirational songs about real events.

LISTEN TO BURNING OF THE CLEVELAND SCHOOL AND FATE OF THE TALMADGE OSBORNE

Burning of the Cleveland School

J.H. Howell’s Carolina Hillbillies, January 28, 1938

On the night of May 18, 1923, approximately 300 people headed to their small local country school southeast of Camden, South Carolina, to attend the children's graduation play. Tragically, seventy-six people were killed when an oil lamp overturned during the performance. Howell may have inspired to record the song after hearing a 78 issued the year before by the Dixon Brothers.

Click here to listen to Burning of the Cleveland School

Fate of Talmadge Osborne

Ernest Stoneman, January 29, 1927

As Norm Cohen writes in Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folk Song, "Nothing has so altered the fact of this continent so much as the web of parallel steel ribbons that Americans began to weave across it in the 1830s". But, along with progress, railways represented death and destruction. Here, Stoneman sings of the death of Talmadge Osborne, Virginia, who was killed trying to board a freight train in Williamson County, VA. It wasn't a catastrophic disaster, the death of only one man, but the haunting refrain transforms Osborne from just any man into an Everyman:

“There’s many a man’s been murdered by the railroad,

There’s many a man’s been murdered by the railroad,

There’s many a man’s been murdered by the railroad"

Click here to listen to The Fate Of Talmadge Osbourne

People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs is out on Tompkins Square

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