Five people have been lost descending to the wreck of the Titanic in a small submersible craft. A frantic search for them is underway, but unless the story gets a miracle ending, it seems the “unsinkable” ship is still claiming lives.
The mythic element of the sinking of the Titanic seems to have dissipated in the years since James Cameron’s movie brought the tragedy to theaters and living rooms. For previous generations it stood as a warning about human hubris. Songs about the disaster began appearing within days of the wreck, and many, like the unknown writer of the most enduring, “The Great Titanic,” saw it as a morality tale.
When building the great Titanic
They said what they would do
They said that they could build a ship
That water would not go through
But God with his mighty hand
Showed the world it could not stand
It was sad when that great ship went down
People probably recorded the song on wax cylinders. discs appeared in 1925, and it saw a revival during the Great Folk Music Scare, when it was released by Woody Guthrie, Roy Acuff and Pete Seeger, among others. Ernest V. Stoneman’s 1925 version became a hit, but the words are hard to make out on those primitive recordings, so here’s a similar arrangement by A.L. Phipps and the Phipps Family.
In proper folk-song tradition, one verse was devoted to a lament for the doomed passengers in steerage.
When that great ship left England
She was making for the shores
When the rich declared
They would not ride with the poor
So they put the poor below
And they were the first to go
It was sad when that great ship went down
Which makes me wonder whether anyone will write an elegy for people who paid $250,000 apiece to gawk at the wreckage.