Bob Dylan’s latest studio album, Tempest, includes a 14 minute song, also called “Tempest,” about the sinking of the Titanic. It’s a fine song, but I find it more interesting as a piece of musical folklore and history. “Tempest” is Dylan’s go at a broadside & disaster ballad, which has a long and fine tradition in American music.

I often think of folk music as something as old as the hills — that songs like “Barbara Allen” and “Coo-Coo Bird” have no author but their players. But that’s only part of the picture. Other equally famous and wide-spread songs, like “Frankie and Johnny” or “Jesse James” or “Delia,” are based in real people and events, made legendary for the purposes of song. You can visit Old Dan Tucker’s grave right here in Georgia.

The Titanic provides a particularly recent, concrete and fertile example of this process. Within just a few years of the 1912 sinking, there were dozens of songs circulating in the America. These songs are old enough now that we call them “folk music,” but at one point, it was just “music.”

The disaster has so many allegorical elements — the class struggle, the band nobly playing “Nearer My God to Thee,” the hubris of man to call anything unsinkable — that it can give rise to many different kinds of song. And the same song can find different emphasis in the hands of different players.

I’ll link to a few of my favorites here, as well as some other resources if you’d like to learn more.

Pete Seeger’s cheery rendition of a famous Titanic song

The Carter Family with the same song

Lead Belly

Art Rosenbaum’s “Backroads and Banjos” podcast on songs from the disaster:

Part 1

Part 2

I have a long personal fascination with the Titanic, which began when I built a large-scale plastic model of the ship. It took weeks, and I got to know every floorboard it seems. Since then, I’ve read several books about the disaster, marveled over the crockery pulled up from the ocean floor, seen stained dressing gowns in an Edinburgh museum that were worn by survivors plucked from lifeboats, and been the only visitor who was not a teenage girl at the Titanic Experience in Orlando.