>On an evening in December 1981 a carrier vessel came into trouble off the coast of England
>From Penlee Lifeboat Station a lifeboat called Solomon Browne set out in an attempt to rescue those one board
>Both vessels were lost and sixteen people died
>In 2008 Seth Lakeman released a song about the tragedy named after the lifeboat
Any other folk music fans on LULZ have other examples of where relatively small events in history have been immortalised through song like this?
I find it interesting as despite the advance of humanity and technology, events that could easily slip out of popular memory still persist and are carried forward through song.
Other examples:
Ghosts by Lau recalls the Morecambe Bay tragedy when 23 Chinese cockle pickers got caught by incoming tides and were killed.
Duffy's Cut is a song written by Wally Page about Irish workers on the Pennsylvanian railroad which were suspected of having been murdered with their deaths covered up as cholera.
OP, bumping bc this a great topic (so mods will delete it shortly). There are a lot of traditional disaster songs but I've always assumed they were just songs about the type of thing that happens, rather than about specific historical events. I will have to look into it. I wonder about this one, a banger for 200+ years: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gtdnJBQyQJU
Irish folk is great for this and as you said some of them generally go for general messages rather than specific events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_Whale_Fisheries
"Paddy on the Road" or "Building Up And Tearing England Down" is a popular folk song about Irish navvies and the harsh work conditions they endured constructing the railroads and canals of Britain.
First made famous by Luke Kelly and The Dubliners and more recently revived by The Mary Whallopers:
%C3%B3NaLife
OP this is heroin to me, never stop posting.
My favourite recent example regarding the Mary Wallopers is that there was a pub song from the 80s that existed pretty much specifically within Dundalk in Ireland that came into existence because one night a well-liked local pub owner decided to stay open late (against the law) and the local police raided the bar for it.
The band has recorded their version of it and now wider Ireland is aware of it so a single event where police fined a pub owner and ruined a good evening for revellers is immortalised.
Never heard of the Mary Whallopers, checking this out.
Tangential but folk music is great for tragic stories, this isn't an original observation but the country music songbook is darker than 50 goth bands. And it's great that young musicians are keeping the traditions alive. Here's a great bluegrass kid who had some measure of success recently with a modern (but non specific disaster) song in a trad style.
I think, strangely enough, I saw this guy just randomly on tiktok before.
It is very heavily tragedy based, I think there's an undercurrent there as you can see how a lot of Bluegrass and Appalachian music finds its roots in the likes of Irish/Scottish folk with banjos and fiddles coming into it.
You can see some of the parallels but different mindsets of the times as well.
Cousin Jack is a Cornish folk song about the lives of mining towns during the economic downturn of the Thatcher era where people had to emigrate for work as mines closed.
You get an idea of how fiercely Cornish and protective it is in spirit as they sing about their fear of "the English" living in their houses as the tourism industry built its grip on Cornwall and "the Spanish fishing in our sea" as a reference to Britain joining the European Economic Area and adopting shared fishing zones with neighbouring nations.
Never heard Cornish music in my life, this is great.
I think Billy Strings is a "big deal" in modern bluegrass, which is probably a big fish/small pond situation, but the fact that this kind of music gets any exposure in the larger culture is great imo. I support TikTok bluegrass.
One thing about folk music is that the tragedies are usually personal, there's political/protest folk which will remember specific instances but the blues for example is synonymous with everyday, universal sadness. This is an interesting exception - not a small historical event, but something I think is rare particularly in the blues and apolitical folk generally:
This is fascinating as an example because if you think "WW2 song against Hitler" it's often going to be some kind of pomp-filled military style band tune. "OVER THERE! OVER THERE! SEND THE WORD" etc
Another one I've thought of is the Scottish song "MacPherson's Rant" which recalls a mythologised account of the execution of a famous outlaw who was apparently a skilled player of the fiddle which he played before his death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Macpherson
>you can see how a lot of Bluegrass and Appalachian music finds its roots in the likes of Irish/Scottish folk
One thing that really shocked me was encountering a tune I was familiar with from John Playford's 1651 compilation The English Dancing Master (Parson's Farewell, specifically) in Jean Ritchie's repertoire three hundred years later; I wasn't even aware there were lyrics to go with the melody until finding that version, and I'm pretty sure they're not even available anywhere else
On that note, I suppose I ought to link the album rip (The Most Dulcimer) because I'm not sure if it's even available anywhere else on the internet (certainly not the lyrics in question)
http://grapewrath.blogspot.com/2009/12/jean-ritchie-most-dulcimer.html
http://www.mediafire.com/download/qcqauzi0nri/JeaRit-tMoDul.zip
A song about a fire in Sanilac, Michigan. Original arrangement based on unaccompanied archival vocal recordings made during a project to collect folk songs from old people .
?si=OzCzLUnfp-qliPZU
This is fantastic, a simple tribute of community spirit against a natural disaster.
Woody Guthrie did a couple of tracks about Michigan history, this is about the Italian Hall disaster where striking miners and their families died in a fire.
Cool. I've looked into Michiganian folk music to sort of make efforts towards discovering what our culture is since it's been so overshadowed in my view by the mainstream (largely Hollywood) culture. I found the original recording from 1939 here. As you can hear its a very different rhythm.
https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1939007_afs02304b/
This youtube channel has a lot more recordings like that.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFUewdg8q82g1wrMWHHccJ-faq5YriL56
Oh actually I just listened to it and the original has a darker verse about a man who fled, had everything burnt down and who "was reduced quickly to want and misery". Not quite as much of a hugfest as it seems.
THERE'S THE TRAGEDY
Proper folk song status secured
This is another good one. Hits home even more for me cause I went to traverse city once and what it's getting to be really would make you say "oh dear".
?si=gZb2wMgZI0IwX7Wv
Rufford Park Poachers, pertaining to a specific incident in 1850/1851 (varies by source) in Rufford Park, Nottinghamshire, England.
Background:
>enclosure acts gradually strip away waste and common land, which rural populace largely depended on for supporting themselves
>industrialization creates a huge surplus of agricultural workers (causing widespread unemployment and lower wages) while rent simultaneously rises due to the economic growth it creates
>the average person is consequently forced to either move into urban squalor or take up poaching to make ends meet
>the latter inevitably results in friction with gamekeepers, perceived as enforcing an unfair monopoly on game animals by wealthy landowners (a trend which I would assume could be traced to the old Norman-era forest law system, set in place to prevent overhunting of game/destruction of their habitat)
Event:
>forty local poachers band together in response to gamekeeper interventions
>group is confronted by ten gamekeepers, resulting in a skirmish
>keepers are driven off, with one sustaining a fractured skull and later dying from the injury
>four ringleaders of the group are convicted of manslaughter and each sentenced to fourteen years of transportation/penal servitude
Two modern performances:
1908 field recording, performed by singer Joseph Taylor (bottom left corner of pic) and recorded by Australian composer Percy Grainger (top middle)
According to the birth year on his wikipedia page Taylor would have been 17 or 18 at the time of the incident; I've also seen claims elsewhere that he was incidentally a gamekeeper himself, but can't verify if that's actually true or not.
I love this one very obscure
?si=4pqTn41thE5ks94m
New Australia was a utopian socialist settlement in Paraguay created by the New Australian Movement. The colony was officially founded on 28 September 1893 as Colonia Nueva Australia and comprised 238 people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Australia?useskin=vector
I have never heard of this before at all which kinda nails what I'm going for with the thread. Realistically probably wouldn't have learned about this event until this song popped up on some insane spotify recommendation.
"Tom Paine's Bones" was written in the 90s by Graham Moore and commemorates Thomas Paine.
This is still being re-recorded by modern folk artists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine
The Royal Charter is a bit well known than the other two. While the loss of a ship or a dangerous voyage is never a negligible affair these were so long ago that these songs no longer have the emotional pull for those who were affected, knew the affected or were but a few generations away.
Here is an extremely local tune. Parowan is an old Utah town that suffered all the trouble of Indians and general deprivation during the early days. I recently visited for the first time. My family were among the old settlers and this tune was at one time quite well known there. Can’t find much about it, don’t know if it was written for some occasion or by someone only passing through. It’s in a couple tunebooks but I went to a jam in Salt Lame City and nobody knew it there.
https://vimeo.com/73322234
"Both Sides The Tweed" is more of a political folk song favoured by Scottish nationalists. Written in 1979 about the Treaty of Union which led to the union of Scotland and England to establish "Great Britain".
It notes the corruption involved in the negotiations around the Act of Union in 1707 and was written in response to when the first Scottish Parliament Referendum was held and a ruling established that a simple majority wasn't enough to win a Scottish Parliament and an inflated voter turnout was required. This resulted in the referendum failing despite a majority vote in favour.
The message of the song is one of responding to this betrayal with pride and friendship and "both sides the Tweed" references the River Tweed which divides Scotland and England.
Something very specific to the era where the conflict in Northern Ireland had made sectarianism in Scotland even more intense and there was a pushback against the more violent anti-english nationalism of some Scottish folk.
A little off topic, but the Swiss folk metal band Eluveitie wrote a concept album about the Gallic Wars, including lyrics in Gaulish, which is considered an extinct language. The girl on the cover of their album "Slania", who the album is named after, now speaks Gaulish.
http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/eluveitie/helvetios.html#1
?si=7XV6fIH-78H_d0mx
This an interview with Slania from an anniversary reissue of tge album that feature a remake of the cover with her as a grown woman.
?si=2lv3uzD0Uxg-tYPJ
I remember listening to this ages ago and didn't even realise the significance. That's an incredible effort on their part and it's such a tangible way of reviving the language.
There's a very different end to the spectrum to this where Irish folk music was very much the one area you'd still have people singing in Irish language (the national anthem is entirely in Irish) when English is the primary language.
But recent years have seen more of a revival outside of the education system for people to pick up and use the language and there is now a popular Belfast based rap group called Kneecap (a reference to paramilitary knee-cappings) who rap in Irish.
(I have heard some allegations about these lads so keep them at arms length even if you like the music)
This song was written after an event where one of the group's members was arrested by the police after he was caught spraypainting "Cearta" (Rights) on a wall and refused to give his name in English (a tale as old as time in Ireland)
Obviously this is rap but in terms of the culture of young people in Ireland the connection to Irish language in music has always been through folk and rebel songs and the transition to a more modern format comes through this kind of rebel song version of hip hop
I gotta get in the shower or I'm not gonna end up bathing today but I'll try to remember to hear it.
Oh, Ex Deo also made music about the same shit from the Roman perspective if you like the Eluveitie album. A lot more of a brutal victorious vibe compared to Helvetios which is about resistance and victimization.
http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/exdeo/romulus.html#2