Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Titanic Blues Hi Henry Brown & Charlie Jordan
2. Wreck Of the Old 97 Skillet Lickers
3. Bill Wilson Birmingham Jug Band
4. The Crash Of the Akron Bob Miller
5. The Fate of Talmadge Osborne Ernest Stoneman
6. El Mole Rachmim (Für Titanik) Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt
7. The Wreck Of the Virginian Alfred Reed
8. Fate of Will Rogers & Wiley Post Bill Cox
9. Down With The Old Canoe Dixon Brothers
10. Wreck Of Number 52 Cliff Carlisle
11. Kassie Jones Part 1 Furry Lewis
12. Kassie Jones Part 2 Furry Lewis
13. The Brave Engineer Carver Boys
14. The Sinking Of The Titanic Richard "Rabbit" Brown
15. Fate Of Chris Lively And Wife Blind Alfred Reed
16. Wreck On The Mountain Road Red Fox Chasers
17. The Unfortunate Brakeman Kentucky Ramblers
18. Altoona Freight Wreck Riley Puckett
19. The Fatal Wreck Of The Bus Mainer's Mountaineers
20. Last Scene Of the Titanic Frank Hutchison
21. Casey Jones Skillet Lickers
22. The Wreck Of The Westbound Airliner Fred Pendleton
23. The Titanic Ernest Stoneman
24. When That Great Ship Went Down William & Versey Smith

Disc 2:

1. The Story of the Mighty Mississippi Ernest Stoneman
2. Mississippi Heavy Water Blues Robert Hicks
3. Dixie Boll Weevil Fiddlin' John Carson
4. Mississippi Boweavil Charlie Patton
5. Ohio Prison Fire Bob Miller
6. Memphis Flu Elder Curry
7. Explosion in the Fairmount Mine Blind Alfred Reed
8. Storm That Struck Miami Fiddlin' John Carson
9. When the Levee Breaks Kansas Joe & Memphis Minnie
10. Alabama Flood Andrew Jenkins
11. Burning of the Cleveland School J. H. Howell's Carolina Hillbillies
12. High Water Everywhere, Part 1 Charlie Patton
13. High Water Everywhere, Part 2 Charlie Patton
14. Ryecove Cyclone Martin & Roberts
15. McBeth Mine Explosion Cap, Andy & Flip
16. Dry Well Blues Charlie Patton
17. Baltimore Fire Charlie Poole
18. Tennessee Tornado Uncle Dave Macon
19. Dry Spell Blues, Part 2 Son House
20. The Santa Barbara Earthquake Green Bailey
21. The Death of Floyd Collins Vernon Dalhart
22. The Porto Rico Storm Carson Robison Trio
23. Boll Weavil W. A. Lindsey & Alvin Condor
24. The Flood of 1927 Elders McIntorsh & Edwards

Disc 3:

1. Peddler And His Wife Hayes Shepherd
2. The Little Grave in Georgia Earl Johnson
3. Kenney Wagner's Surrender Ernest Stoneman
4. Henry Clay Beattie Kelly Harrell
5. The Murder Of the Lawson Family Carolina Buddies
6. Naomi Wise Clarence Ashley
7. Railroad Bill Will Bennett
8. Frankie Dykes Magic City Trio
9. Trial of Richard Bruno Hauptmann, Part 1 Bill Cox
10. Trial of Richard Bruno Hauptmann, Part 2 Bill Cox
11. Lanse Des Belaires Dennis McGee & Ernest Fruge
12. Darling Cora B.F. Shelton
13. Billy Lyons and Stack O' Lee Furry Lewis
14. Tom Dooley Grayson and Whitter
15. The Story of Freda Bolt Floyd County Ramblers
16. Pretty Polly John Hammond
17. Fingerprints Upon the Windowpane Bob Miller
18. The Bluefield Murder Roy Harvey & The North Carolina Ramblers
19. Frankie Silvers Ashley & Foster
20. Fate of Rhoda Sweeten Wilmer Watts
21. Dupree Blues Willie Walker
22. Poor Ellen Smith Dykes Magic City Trio

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61004 in Music
• Released on: 2007-09-25
• Number of discs: 3
• Format: Box set
• Dimensions: .75 pounds

Album Description
"In the late 1920's and early 1930's, the Depression gripped the Nation. It was a time when songs were tools for living. A whole community would turn out to mourn the loss of a member and to sow their songs like seeds. This collection is a wild garden grown from those seeds."
- Tom Waits, from the Introduction

Songs of death, destruction and disaster, recorded by black and white performers from the dawn of American roots recording are here, assembled together for the first time. Whether they document world-shattering events like the sinking of the Titanic or memorialize long forgotten local murders or catastrophes, these 70 recordings - over 30 never before reissued - are audio messages in a bottle reflecting a lost world where age old ballads rubbed up against songs inspired by the day's headlines.

Produced and annotated by the Grammy winning team of Christopher King and Henry "Hank" Sapoznik with an introduction by Tom Waits, the accompanying 48-page three-CD anthology designed by Grammy award winning Susan Archie brims with many eye-popping historic images never before reproduced.

Customer Reviews

Grandpa's Death Metal
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.

As hip and as dark as old time music gets!
This is one really stunning project but for many reasons! I got it initially because I love pre-war blues and Tom Waits but I didn't realize how beautifully put together the whole thing was until I opened it up. When the whole book is opened up, the inside spreads almost 22 inches and there are several fully reproduced panorama photographs of disasters: one of the aftermath of the Baltimore Fire looks like an atom bomb went off and another of a train wreck really captures the devastation of these early disasters. The introduction by Tom Waits is beyond cool. It has the archaic cadence of these songs and yet perfectly describes how these pieces were written and spread throughout communities. Besides the beautiful writings, photographs, and annotations, I am most impressed with both the wide variety of songs (there were many I had never heard before) and the actual sonic clarity of the collection. What is truly a revelation is how great certain songs sound compared to other cd issues. If you like cool eye and ear candy, then this is for you.

A Brilliant Slice of History
The ballad, a song that tells a story, in the modern world is something of a fading form. But in the age before cable news and internet immediacy, much of the world got their news of important events from song. In this brilliant work, Chris King and Hank Sapoznik have created a remarkable collection of songs that told of disasters, man-made and natural. The stories range from the sinking of the Titanic and famous train wrecks, floods and fires to murders and mine disasters.

The collection, presented in a beautifully packaged 3 CD boxed set, is expertly produced with the sound of the original 78 RPM recordings preserved with a minimum of noise and all of the original musical content. This is typical of King's Grammy Award winning work. Sapoznik's (a noted historian of both old-time American and Yiddish music) excellent notes offer both historical context and a deep musical insight. The introductory essay from Tom Waits is one of the most insightful takes on the ballad I have ever read.

I can't recommend this highly enough. For anyone who wishes to understand American musical history (or just loves the music), this is a serious must-have.