Heather Sparling’s Disaster Songs as Intangible Memorials in Atlantic Canada is an exemplary study of the continuing relevance of (mostly) vernacular song in the present day. Sparling uses the genre of vernacular memorials as a way of thinking through the role of disaster songs. While the book focuses mostly on Atlantic Canadian songs and disasters, there are references to those in other places. It relies on a broad range of research methods and sources including ethnographic interviews, newspaper accounts, online recordings of songs, and statistics.
This book begins with a preface, aptly titled “Come All Ye” after the opening line of many broadside ballads and arguably an emic genre of songs common in Northeastern North America (see Ives 1978, 60), which introduces the reader to the subject of disaster songs by way of a mini case study of the Springhill Mine disaster and the songs it spawned. In the introduction that follows, Sparling gives an account of how she started her disaster songs research and the database she developed. She outlines the limitations of her corpus in sections on diversity and the definition of disaster and also provides background on several contextual realms of relevance to her study: broadside ballads, death and memorial culture, news media, music and death, and the special role Atlantic Canada plays in spawning disaster songs. The chapter ends with a discussion of research methods, the study’s place in the field of ethnomusicology, and an overview of the rest of the book. Chapter 2 defines and provides history on three major cultural forms that are key to Sparling’s argument: formal memorials, vernacular memorials, and disaster songs.
As Sparling notes in the introduction, chapters 3 through 8 largely follow six elements of significance in vernacular memorials and explore how those relate to disaster songs: memorial content, place, spontaneity and informality, ephemerality, motivation, and the role of the media. In chapter 3, Sparling treats the content of disaster songs, discussing how they have been influenced over time by broadside ballads, the early printed music and recorded music industries, and the mid-twentieth-century folk revival, and providing an overview of their musical features. Chapter 4 is about the role of place, both in the location of spontaneous memorials and the relationship of disaster songs to Atlantic Canadian musical and labor culture. Chapter 5 focuses on spontaneity and ephemerality in disaster songs, including a discussion of the relationship between music and grief, the relationship between a song’s style and the speed at which it appears, the role of musical elements in creating particular affective responses, the participatory nature of disaster songs, and the reasons for the ephemeral nature of the songs. This chapter also contains a comparison of the orientations of vernacular memorials and disaster songs. While this discussion is important to the overall argument of the book, it feels a bit shoe-horned into this chapter.
Chapters 6 and 7 delve into the motivations behind the creation of disaster songs. Chapter 6 focuses on changes in death culture and how disaster songs have broadly changed from expressing a fatalistic worldview to subtly blaming people and institutions for disasters. Of particular interest in this chapter is a discussion of how songs differ based on whether songwriters see themselves as historians or artists. Chapter 7 focuses more on the personal motivations of disaster songs including the varying degrees of relation songwriters can have with the victims of a disaster, the use of songwriting to process grief, and the relationship between societal expectations of expressions of grief for different genders and different styles of disaster songs.
Chapter 8 is about the reciprocal relationship over time between disaster songs and the media, as songs can spread news (the historical role of the broadside ballad) and news coverage can inspire songs, bring them to audiences, and provide a source of factual information for songwriters. Interestingly, Sparling found that the more a disaster was covered by the media, the more songs there would be about it.
The book ends with a conclusion, which, like the preface, contains a case study of a specific disaster and the songs it spawned. Sparling uses the rest of the conclusion to briefly explore topics not covered in the book, such as why certain disasters inspire more songs than others and why certain disaster songs gain greater popularity than others, the benefits of the intangibility of songs (versus the tangibility of vernacular memorials), and the relationship between disaster and protest songs and disaster songs and the COVID-19 pandemic.
I have a couple of minor critiques of Disaster Songs.It would have potentially been enriched in places by a comparison to Roger Renwick’s work on poetry of the Lofthouse Colliery Disaster (1980, chapter 5), which discusses how the content of these poems changes based on how close the writer was to the disaster. Also, while one of Sparling’s main arguments is that the increase in both disaster songs and vernacular memorials since 1980 is a response to changes in a death culture that has become more impersonal and less focused on community, she also notes in chapter 6 that in Atlantic Canada the shift to a less community-focused death culture is slower, which might indicate less of a need for disaster songs there. This, of course, can be explained by the other factors covered in the introduction and chapter 4, such as participatory music culture and high-risk occupations that help contribute to high numbers of disaster songs in the region, but the book would have been strengthened by noting this potential gap in logic.
Overall, however, I would highly recommend this book. The research is extremely thorough and well-considered. Sparling provides extensive discussion of the potential ramifications of her own positionality as a researcher and consistently anticipates potential critiques. She also occasionally points out potential shortcomings in her own arguments, demonstrating a perspective that acquisition of knowledge is an evolving process. Of particular interest is her discussion of how what she found regarding these songs differed from what she thought she would find. Although she had assumed disaster songs “were a premodern vernacular tradition that had declined for a number of reasons” (xv), she discovered instead that there has been a boom in disaster-song writing since 1980. The depth of her research shows this not just about songs, songwriting, and memorialization, but also about broader cultural and occupational topics.
Disaster Songs as Intangible Memorials in Atlantic Canada is also exceptionally well written. Sparling offers a balance between anecdotes, which draw in the reader, and clear exposition of factual detail to support her argument. Most chapters end with a brief recap of their main points and an indication of what comes next. Her use of the characteristics of vernacular memorials as an organizational scheme for chapter topics, and her choice to begin with Maurice Ruddick’s song about the Springhill Mine disaster and to conclude with a song written by his great-granddaughter, also contribute to the book’s sense of cohesion. This book will be useful to those in many disciplines, including ethnomusicology, folklore, anthropology, and media studies.
Works Cited
Ives, Edward. 1978. Joe Scott: The Woodsman-Songmaker. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Renwick, Roger deV. 1980. English Folk Poetry: Structure and Meaning. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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[Review length: 1201 words • Review posted on April 9, 2025]