Close your eyes and hear the suffering through the ages, as disasters both great and small are relived in song by roving musicians with only a fiddle or a guitar to stake their claim on history.
Close your eyes and see the carnage reenacted. In Frank Hutchison's "Last Scene of the Titanic," see all the pretty ladies in their evening gowns and all of the tuxedoed gentlemen plummet over the deck of the great juggernaut as it collides with a massive iceberg, sending them wailing and flailing and thrashing in a demonic ballet into the icy Atlantic waters.
Open your ears and hear the plaintive cry of a child in the night, who wakes from a portentous dream in which his daddy is trapped in the interminable blackness of the coal mine (Blind Alfred Reed's "Explosion in the Fairmount Mine"), only to discover that dear daddy was indeed trapped in a mine explosion and is one of 200 unrecovered miners never to see the light of day again.
True-life scenes such as these are the subject of this massive 3-cd set, in which seemingly congenial-sounding folk and blues songs from the early twentieth century document disasters and real-life tragedies with a quiet intensity that disturbs the casual listener far more than any contemporary death metal band could. This is not Sturm und Drang, this is real pain and suffering devoid of fantasy or romanticism. These are songs for the legions of anonymous dead, musical coffin markers for the ones who were lost along the way.
Highlights range from the grim to the funny. In "Mississippi Heavy Water Blues," Robert "Barbecue Bob" Hicks complains that the murky brown flood waters have washed all the wimmenfolk away. The original version of "When the Levee Breaks" by Kansas Joe & Memphis Minnie remains a haunting testament to the 1927 Mississippi Flood. Charlie Poole's "Baltimore Fire" is spectral in its account of hundreds consumed by the flames of a raging inferno. Then there's my personal favorite, Bob Miller's "Ohio Prison Fire", in which a distraught mother is asked to identify the charred remains of her late lamented son:
"I'll take my boy back now. The state's finished with him. The state's finished with all of these bodies. These poor, charred bodies!"
Disc Three switches the focus to murder ballads, showcasing songs of cold-blooded homicide that have influenced the work of such hardboiled musical greats as Johnny Cash, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits, the latter providing the eloquent introduction to this set. Early versions of such blood-soaked ballads as "Billy Lyons and Stack O'Lee" (the legend of Stack O'Lee or "Stagger Lee" exists in many forms) and "Darling Cora" (also known as "Darling Corey") stand alongside lesser-known death row oddities like "The Trial of Richard Bruno Hauptmann, Pts. I & II," an ode to the murderer of the Lindbergh baby. True crime buffs may favor this disc as much as musicologists.
Special mention should be made to the impeccable sonic reproduction by Christopher King, who understands the mystical power inherent in the snap, crackle, and pop of old 78 records and faithfully reproduces the elusive sound of the victrola, cranked up and wailing away like a banshee in a tin can. The static of these old grooves perfectly encases the sadness of bygone eras like ancient beetles trapped in amber. Timeless and lifeless.
In today's post-9/11 world, the fear of arbitrary annihilation is almost taken for granted, yet this collection serves as a moving reminder that tragedies of every kind have always lived on in the music of American folk musicians, perhaps to serve as a talisman for future generations.
