(Blues) VA - People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938 (3 CD Set) - 2007, MP3, 320 kbps

1 Hi Henry Brown & Charlie Jordan - Titanic Blues 3:14
2 Skillet Lickers , Riley Puckett - Wreck Of The Old 97 2:54
3 Birmingham Jug Band - Bill Wilson 3:21
4 Bob Miller (4) - The Crash Of The Akron 3:31
5 Ernest Stoneman - The Fate Of Talmadge Osborne 3:06
6 Cantor Josef Rosenblatt - El Mole Rachmim (Für Titanik) 3:31
7 Blind Alfred Reed - Wreck Of The Virginian 2:59
8 Bill Cox - Fate Of Will Rogers & Wiley Post 3:17
9 Dixon Brothers - Down With The Old Canoe 2:52
10 Cliff Carlisle - Wreck Of Number 52 3:16
11 Furry Lewis - Kassie Jones Part 1 3:07
12 Furry Lewis - Kassie Jones Part 2 3:04
13 Carver Boys - The Brave Engineer 3:16
14 Richard "Rabbit" Brown - The Sinking Of The Titanic 3:48
15 Blind Alfred Reed - Fate Of Chris Lively And Wife 3:25
16 Paul Miles (2) And Red Fox Chasers, The - Wreck Of The Mountain Road 2:37
17 Kentucky Ramblers - The Unfortunate Brakeman 2:26
18 Riley Puckett - Altoona Freight Wreck 2:37
19 J.E. Mainer's Mountaineers - The Fatal Wreck Of The Bus 2:48
20 Frank Hutchison - Last Scene Of The Titanic 3:29
21 Skillet Lickers - Casey Jones 2:48
22 Fred Pendleton & West Virginia Melody Boys, The - The Wreck Of The Westbound Airliner 2:58
23 Ernest Stoneman - The Titanic 3:14
24 William & Versey Smith* - When That Great Ship Went Down 2:57

1 Ernest Stoneman - The Story Of The Mighty Mississippi 3:07
2 Robert Hicks - Mississippi Heavy Water Blues 3:04
3 Fiddlin' John Carson - Dixie Boll Weevil 2:59
4 Charlie Patton* - Mississippi Boweavil 3:06
5 Charlotte* And Bob Miller (4) - Ohio Prison Fire 3:21
6 Elder Curry - Memphis Flu 3:27
7 Blind Alfred Reed - Explosion In The Fairmount Mine 3:03
8 Fiddlin' John Carson - Storm That Struck Miami 3:02
9 Kansas Joe* & Memphis Minnie - When The Levee Breaks 3:13
10 Andrew Jenkins - Alabama Flood 3:18
11 J. H. Howell's Carolina Hillbillies - Burning Of The Cleveland School 3:02
12 Charlie Patton* - High Water Everywhere, Part 1 3:07
13 Charlie Patton* - High Water Everywhere, Part 2 3:06
14 Asa Martin & James Roberts (3) - Ryecove Cyclone 3:03
15 Cap, Andy & Flip - McBeth Mine Explosion 2:52
16 Charlie Patton* - Dry Well Blues 3:20
17 Charlie Poole - Baltimore Fire 3:12
18 Uncle Dave Macon & McGee Brothers, The - Tennessee Tornado 3:14
19 Son House - Dry Spell Blues Part 2 3:14
20 Green Bailey - The Santa Barbara Earthquake 2:57
21 Vernon Dalhart - The Death Of Floyd Collins 3:29
22 Carson Robison Trio - The Porto Rico Storm 2:33
23 W. A. Lindsey & Alvin Condor - Boll Weavil 2:59
24 Elders McIntorsh And Edwards* - The Flood Of 1927 3:14

1 Appalachia Vagabond (Hayes Shepherd), The* - Peddler And His Wife 3:24
2 Earl Johnson (2) - The Little Grave In Georgia 3:07
3 Ernest Stoneman And Kahle Brewere - Kenny Wagner's Surrender 2:23
Written-By - Andrew Jenkins
4 Kelly Harrell - Henry Clay Beattie 3:09
5 Carolina Buddies - The Murder Of The Lawson Family 3:27
Written-By - Walter "Kid" Smith*
6 Clarence Ashley - Naomi Wise 2:53
7 Will Bennett - Railroad Bill 2:59
8 Dykes Magic City Trio - Frankie 3:02
9 Bill Cox - Trial Of Richard Bruno Hauptmann, Part 1 3:00
10 Bill Cox - Trial Of Richard Bruno Hauptmann, Part 2 3:04
11 Dennis McGee & Ernest Fruge - Lanse Des Belaires 2:50
12 B.F. Shelton - Darling Cora 3:53
13 Furry Lewis - Billy Lyons And Stack O'Lee 2:37
14 Grayson And Whitter* - Tom Dooley 3:10
15 Floyd County Ramblers - The Story Of Freda Bolt 3:37
Written-By - Dock M. Shanks
16 John Hammond - Pretty Polly 3:11
17 Bob Miller (4) - Fingerprints Upon The Windowpane 3:00
18 Roy Harvey And North Carolina Ramblers, The - The Bluefield Murder 3:08
19 Ashley* And Foster* - Frankie Silvers 3:05
20 Wilmer Watts - Fate Of Rhoda Sweeten 3:11
21 Willie Walker - Dupree Blues 3:29
22 Dykes Magic City Trio - Poor Ellen Smith 3:12

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.

Times are tough. Times are always tough. But times used to be much tougher.
A recent report noted the global rise of the standard of living, and the U.S. stock market keeps hitting all-time highs. Even if the relative prosperity of America is tempered by the troubling observation that, contrary to the usual positive economic indicators, life isn't getting much better, life in general doesn't seem that bad.
Every so often, though, we get a glimpse of what once was and what could very well be again. The precarious, precipitous housing market leads to talk of recession, which inevitably brings up depression. The Hurricane Katrina humanitarian disaster provided an alternate-reality view of the United States as Third World nation. The resolution of the United Auto Workers strike settled the weight of thousands of jobs bobbling in the balance. The death toll and number of wounded in Iraq and elsewhere creeps upward, reminders of a time when sacrifice was compulsory, not voluntary.
Yes, times are tough, but times used to be absolutely terrible-- rife with starvation, disease, extreme poverty, and senseless death. As relative prosperity continues unabated, perspective predictably fades. People Take Warning: Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938 provides that perspective with three discs of abject misery, songs about misery, miserable people, and the miserable things they've done or that were done to them. It's the epitome of a bad trip back in time, and a riveting collection of musical snapshots capturing a country teetering on the edge of the abyss, looking down, and singing songs about what they see.
Titled "Man V. Machine", the first disc focuses on songs of train wrecks, plane crashes, and the odd car accident, and features lot of songs about the Titanic, in particular. The other two discs are titled "Man V. Nature" and "Man V. Man [And Woman, Too]", respectively, and tackle just what their names imply: natural disasters and good ol' fashioned murdering.
It's harrowing and horrifying stuff, but there's a twisted element of rueful humor to this set, too. "If it bleeds, it leads," goes the cynical journalism saying, and these horror stories, drawn from headlines, serve much the same purposes as the tabloids, providing tales of loss you can't turn away from. It's also a little like the scene of the accident on the side of the highway, with traffic slowed to a near halt so that everybody can get a good look, as if they don't already know what they're going to see.
You generally know what you're going to get here, too, but just because it's familiar sounding hardly means it's full of household names. The set inevitably includes a few songs from such usual suspects as Son House and Charley Patton, as well as often anthologized tracks like Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie's "When the Levee Breaks". There are also plenty of well-known subjects, like the infamous Old 97 train, conductor Casey Jones, the doomed Tom Dooley, and the reliably murderous Stack O'Lee. But there are countless surprises as well, like "El Mole Rachmim (für Titanik)", a song that stresses how much the great ship's sinking resonated with recent Eastern European Jewish immigrants.
Music like this has always been the province of obsessive collectors, and it will probably always remain that way. But there's no question that having this music packaged together by experts and fans beats scouring estate sales for fragile 78s. Whether beautifully packaged (like the astounding gospel collection Goodbye, Babylon), thematically organized (the fun medicine show soundtrack Good for What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows 1926-1937), or both (the still essential Anthology of American Folk Music, which, lest one forget, really was once just part of one man's collection), it's still remarkably powerful and moving all these years-- but really not that many-- later. As Tom Waits puts it in his introductory essay, "The scratches on the 78s sound like the ocean in a shell, and the songs are riding inside across time."

This three-disc, 70-track (30 of them new to the CD era) collection of murder ballads and disaster songs originally released on commercial 78s between 1913 and 1938 is, in spite of the archaic song structures and often crude sonic qualities on display, strangely contemporary in tone and feel, maybe because we've always been drawn to the scene of the accident, and even in this 21st century world of the Internet and all-day, all-night news channels, that's still as true as it ever was. We just don't write songs about such things so much anymore, and since one can just flip on the TV to get up to speed on the latest round of personal, local, and global tragedies, that's probably understandable. A quaint view of why these old songs were so popular back in the day is to say that's how the news traveled back then, but that wouldn't be true. The news media in the early 1900s in America was every bit as dogged and sensational as it is now, and these tragic songs didn't carry the news so much as give it a community focus, good or bad, functioning as street-corner sermons, cautionary tales, or just plain gossip given melody. Some of these songs are straight observational narratives, but some of them have definite agendas. There's a big difference here, for instance, between Charley Patton's two-part personal epic "High Water Everywhere," recorded in 1929 and containing Patton's chilling appraisal of the Mississippi flood from two years earlier, and Elder Curry's sanctified "Memphis Flu" from 1930, which determines the influenza epidemic of that same year was God's stern judgment on the moral paucity of the human species. Both songs carry news, and news that is deeply tragic, but to quite different ends and purposes.
There are easily a dozen songs here about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, an event that could be said to metaphorically carry the Victorian era with it to the bottom of the sea and usher in a world where industrial disasters, whether they be sinking ships, derailing trains, or cars wrecking on the highway, became central symbols in a seemingly endless procession of misfortune. Then there are the murder ballads that make up most of disc three here (the first disc contains songs about the crashing, sinking, and wrecking of various machines and motor vehicles while the second covers floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and other natural world-related calamities, and the third, easily the creepiest, deals with violence between people), many of which have to do with the murders of young and unmarried pregnant women and end with no discernible moral position being taken, and one realizes that tragedies like the sinking of the Titanic are full of terror while the very real murders of Laura Foster (as chronicled by Grayson & Whitter in their 1929 "Tom Dooley"), Naomi Wise (Clarence Ashley's "Naomi Wise," also recorded in 1929), and Ellen Smith ("Poor Ellen Smith," tracked by the Dykes Magic City Trio in 1927) are full of something closer to pure horror and have to be viewed as cautionary tales, or else there is nothing spiritually or emotionally redemptive in them at all.
Is this kind of a morbid collection? Yes, it is, but it is also fascinating for what it reveals about our concepts of mortality, an afterlife, redemption, survival, and abstract looks at things like bravery, heroism, and even a kind of powerful fatalism. In guitarist Frank Hutchison's version of the Titanic disaster, "Last Scene of the Titanic," recorded in 1927, he has people below decks dancing to the sound of fiddles as the ship goes down. Life is full of unexpected tragedies, he seems to be saying, but nothing is really lost by dancing because fate will do what fate always does anyway. If there's an overriding moral point to all of these old songs, that might be it. Take warning, but don't stop dancing as long as the fiddles are still playing. Thanks to Tompkins Square for assembling this marvelous collection. It may be dour and morbid on the surface, full of floods, shipwrecks, hurricanes, suicides, murders, and uncountable disasters, but it is somehow strangely redemptive, too, reminding us that we are all survivors even as it also reminds us that when the music stops, we all have to sit down.