I've thought about this quite a bit since you mentioned it last night Peter, and I can't get by a simple fact.

It's hard to romanticize an incident when we now know what bleeding, dying people ACTUALLY look like..through television.

The vast majority of the great train and ship disasters that have made their way into song were prior to television (and for the most part..newsreels)

For a number of years I sung the hearty/hellish IRA songs of the Clancys, but some time in the late 70s I saw TV footage of the actual results of a pub bombing. Needless to say, it was horrifying, and I can't see anyone not directly involved in "the troubles" wanting to write a musical document about it. I've rarely sung one since. Same thing with the horror of Lockerbie and other airline crashes. Where would a songwriter start? The song could be about a "noble" pilot, but the images of body parts in trees would be impossible to turn into entertainment (and that's what songs are for...even dark ones).

If I might try something here. Gordon Lighfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is arguably his best known song. He gives brief bios of several of the sailors who drowned, and paints a picture of the wild Great Lakes. Had this incident been documented in nightly news clips, culminating in scenes of dredgers trying to find bodies...I doubt if folks would be able to listen to that ballad. Somehow I think the feeling would be that their deaths had been trivialized in a way.

In closing, I suggest anyone who finds this topic interesting, listen to Grit Laskin's masterpiece "In the Blood". A better written song I've never heard...but he CAN'T sing it in public. At it's conclusion, the two or three ausiences who heard it, sat there with their mouths open....staring. The rest of the evening was ruined....by the STRENGTH OF THIS SONG. It's written in 17th century ballad style and is about the man with aids who infected and killed (and is still killing) dozens of women.

rick