Review: "People Take Warning!"

 

ROSENTHAL, Josh (Executive Producer), “People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938”, 2010, Tompkins Square, LLC, New York, NY, USA

 

I have always been fascinated by disasters. Not major disasters, like the San Francisco Earthquake, or the Aceh Tsunami, but smaller scale, more localised things. I guess there’s a limit of scale beyond which the tragedy becomes too great and the ability to focus upon the event just spirals out of control. I am interested in the quirky stuff, like the “Great Toilet-Paper Panic of Tokyo” in 1976, caused by an American Vice-President’s off-the-cuff comment about the US discontinuing its Asian paper-pulp supplies; or the “Los Angeles Zoot-Suit War” of the 40s, conducted by roving bands of lawless fabric wastrels; or this, which is my particular favourite:

 

Yes, the “Great Boston Molasses Spill” of 1919. Seriously, it was chilling stuff, and all you Lovecraft fans out there will note the location and do the Mythos maths: apparently some ghouls have a sweet-tooth.

So when I encountered this set of CDs I thought I’d better have a look. And I’m rather glad I did.

At the turn of last century, the phonograph was becoming ever more popular and there was a crying need for new artists and musical styles to accommodate a bewildering array of tastes. In the US, talent scouts went out into the backwoods and turned up promising performers to add to their labels’ stables: black performers were conscripted as “bluesmen”; white players were corralled as purveyors of “old time music”. Often they were playing by the seat of their pants, taking traditional or well-known tunes and bending them into new shapes to pad out a set or to add to their repertoires. In doing so, they kept an ear to the ground and listened for what their audiences wanted to hear; apparently, a lot of people wanted songs about death destruction and disaster.

 

In an era before the advent of the tabloid magazine and the paparazzi press, songs about calamities were a way of spreading the word. Some performers waited outside the courthouses wherein famous trials were being conducted, and gave musical reports of the evidence sifted and the progress attained. Others listened to radio reports then grabbed their banjo and lit out to the local saloon to cobble together a gruesome narrative for the punters. It was a boom-time for musical ambulance-chasers.

 

The three discs in this set cover three different sets of calamities. On the first disc, entitled “Man V. Machine”, all of the mayhem involves accidents, usually involving boats or trains. Pre-eminent amongst these are songs about the sinking of the Titanic, which caused a rash of tuneful reportage across the country. The first of these on this disc – “Titanic Blues” by Hi Henry Brown & Charlie Jordan - is a love song to Captain Smith, painting him as a saintly figure who did everything in his power to prevent the collision – obviously a song written before the full facts emerged. Later on, there is a Hebrew lament (“El Mole Rachmim – Für Titanik”) performed by Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt who, only two weeks earlier, had been onboard a cross-Atlantic ship. The last two tracks on the disc are two versions of the same Titanic tune - one old time music version and the other a blues take - by Ernest Stoneman and William and Versey Smith respectively, of “When that Great Ship went Down”:

“It was sad when that great ship went down,

It was sad when that great ship went down,

Husbands and wives; li’l children lost their lives,

It was sad when that great ship went down”

It kind of demonstrates, I think, just how quickly these tunes were being thrown together and then passed around. The repetition, showing that if you’re stuck for words or useful content you can just sing the same line over and over, is a giveaway too, like this verse (not the chorus) from “The Fate of Talmadge Osborne” (also by Ernest Stoneman), an ill-starred train jumper who paid the ultimate price for fare-dodging:

“Many a man’s bin murdered by the railroad,

Many a man’s bin murdered by the railroad,

Many a man’s bin murdered by the railroad

And laid in his cold lonesome grave”

 

Disc two is entitled “Man V. Nature”, and it’s chock-full with natural disasters of all kinds from floods, to fires, to influenza epidemics, to plagues of boll weevils (apparently, they “take your farm”). Again, the need to pack in all of the pertinent details about the incident bends the rhymes and forces the performer to squeeze obstreperous words into a rhythm that requires the genius of musical shoe-horning. Listening to these tunes I’m strongly reminded of the ‘poetry’ of William McGonagall who similarly made a hash of cramming facts into his verse, at the expense of any sort of gravitas.

“Cries of ‘fire!’ filled the air,

Mountain men ran everywhere,

In that big Ohio prison tragedy.

Ways to safety were all blocked,

Many cells were barred and locked

And the raging fire brought death and agony.”

“Ohio Prison Fire”, Charlotte & Bob Miller, 1930

This particular tune is delivered in a sunny, lyrical style with a soulful violin soaring over the melody line. But for the words, you’d probably be out there pitching woo. Notably, this song – complete with its super-melodramatic spoken-word break, in which a grieving mother reclaims the horribly-burnt body of her son - came out only three days after the tragedy it describes: quick work!

 

The really odd thing about these ditties is that they are all, for the most part, sung by happy down-home types, who seem oblivious as to the information that they’re imparting: they might well be singing “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” for all the emotional resonance they’re conveying. It sounds like they’re downright pleased that Casey Jones crashed his train.

 

Disc three is all about people offing each other – “Man V. Man”. During this set I actually recognised one of the songs – “Frankie” performed by the Dykes Magic City Trio. This song was known to me from Michelle Shocked and her album “Arkansas Traveller”, although she calls it “Frankie and Johnny”. In this territory too, I had the experience of Nick Cave’s “Murder Ballads” steering me along, so all of the death and mayhem were familiar in concept if not execution. Again, everyone performing was madly delirious about the chaos and the melodies were tinkly and sparkling.

There was one tune that particularly stood out for me and here it is, “The Murder of the Lawson Family” written by Walter “Kid” Smith and performed by the Carolina Buddies:

“It was on last Christmas evening,

A snow was on the ground,

In his home in North Carolina,

The murderer was found.

His name was Charlie Lawson

And he had a loving wife,

But we’ll never know what caused him

To take his family’s life.

They say he killed his wife at first

And the little ones did cry,

‘Please Poppa won’t you spare our lives,

For it is so hard to die?’

But the raging man could not be stopped,

He would not heed their call,

And he kept on firing fatal shots

Until he killed them all.

And when the sad, sad news was heard

It was a great surprise,

He kissed his children and his wife

And then he closed their eyes.

‘And now farewell kind friends and home

I’ll never see you no more;

Into my breast I’ll fire one shot

And my troubles will be o’er.’

They did not carry him to gaol,

No lawyer did he pay;

He’ll have his trial in another world

On the final Judgement Day.

They were all buried in a crowded grave

While angels watched above:

‘Come here, come here, my little ones,

To a land of peace and love.’”

And here’s a photo of the Lawson family burial:

 

That’s something that is really stark about these songs. After you’re through smirking at the crazy phrasing, the folks-ey patois and the banjo-thumping, you remember that it’s all about real, actual events. And that’s a sobering thought.

A constant refrain throughout the songs, and the source of the collection’s title, is the call for people to “take warning!”. This is an exhortation that death may strike at any time and so you’d better get yourself sorted. Wives are told that, if their husbands work on the railroads, they should expect to hear that he’s been killed; the poor are informed that the rich have control over their lives and may well seal them in steerage class to go down with the ship; and God may unleash tornadoes, floods or farm-stealing weevils (I’m still not sure how they do that exactly) at any moment. Life, according to these whimsical, toe-tapping tunes, is short, nasty and brutish and we may find ourselves on the “coolin’ board” any tick of the clock.

People! Take warning! Four-and-a-half tentacled horrors.

"Railroad Bill" on the coolin’ board.