Disaster Songs in folk music are always interesting. Many were very accurately written and told the tale quite well. However the "Folk Process" and the oral/aural tradition kicks in after some years.........well, things get changed a bit. Not always a good way to learn history, but they are more fun to research than others for some of us. You can at least interpret knowledge of the actual events and then apply that to what may have been actually written in the first place. We have a thread tied to several past threads on "Wreck of the Old 97" which illustrates the point quite well.

Many people learned different words here and there that actually make little sense and finding the right word or phrase and why keeps things interesting. I make a lot of jokes about finding the exact word for the 3rd line, 45th verse of "Diddle My Fiddle," but the reality is, the research is often more educational than actually finding the word.

Of course some disaster songs are badly written from the gitgo with little knowledge of the "facts" they portray.

Spaw