Titanic
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-08-24

Day 161 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

There are more folk songs about the Titanic disaster than almost any other 20th century event. The Traditional Ballad Index has catalogued 17 different songs not counting variations of those songs.  Traditional Ballad Index editor, Robert Waltz says, “There is an estimate that there were some 300 works about, or somehow associated with the loss of the Titanic. It is said that 112 different pieces of music inspired by the loss of the Titanic were copyrighted in America in 1912 alone." This version is catalogued as Titanic #2 and is the only entry. So, as far as we know, Sandburg is the first to have published this particular song.

There’s no surprise ending, it collided with an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912.

Sandburg writes: "The central facts of an immense sea tragedy are here. The main narrative lines of each stanza cadence a proud ship sailing at high speed, ending with a slow drawn drag, the silence of the empty sea that follows the "sinkin* down." As a poem, in accuracy of statement, in stresses of details, and in implicative quality, some would rate this above Longfellow's "Wreck of the Hesperus." The arrangement here is based on the singing of Miss Bessie Zaban, formerly of Georgia and now of Chicago; a number of verses were sent to her by C. H. Currie of Atlanta, Georgia. . .

"The dialect is imperfectly rendered. Black troops sang the song crossing the submarine zone and in the trenches overseas. The verses move smoothly, in even pulsations, like the stride of a great ocean liner with its turbines in good working order. The chorus words "ocean" and "Titanic" sway like a swiftly "moving thing abruptly slowed down, struck, staggering and bewildered, while the words "sinkin' down " have the grave, quiet suspension of a requiem."

There are more folk songs about the Titanic disaster than almost any other 20th century event. The Traditional Ballad Index has catalogued 17 different songs not counting variations of those songs. Traditional Ballad Index editor, Robert Waltz says, “There is an estimate that there were some 300 works about, or somehow associated with the loss of the Titanic. It is said that 112 different pieces of music inspired by the loss of the Titanic were copyrighted in America in 1912 alone."