People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs 1913-1938

Tompkins Square Releases Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs This Week
9/29/07

This week Tompkins Square released this 3-CD collection of catastrophic songs that includes airplane and train crashes, lost lives at sea, mining disasters, floods, storms, murders and trials.

This indelible release includes songs by Furry Lewis ("Kassie Jones"), Charley Patton ("High Water Everywhere"), Vernon Dalhart ("The Death of Floyd Collins"), Ernest Stoneman ("Sinking of the Titanic") and many others. These disaster songs were performed by black and white singers during a ruthless time in American history which now serves as a foundation to all music.

Tom Waits wrote in the Introduction of this 48-page booklet, "In the late 1920s and 1930s, 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 from those seeds."

James Calemine

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