Welcome to ‘Disasters Songs in Canada.’ This website serves as a vehicle to present the Canadian disaster songs that three academics have collected and are currently studying. We wanted to share our findings with a broader public but also invite a broader public to work with us in augmenting and correcting our collection.  We welcome your input!

  You can follow Heather Sparling’s disaster song research on Twitter.

Our preliminary research revealed close to 300 Canadian disaster songs.  Performers range from the relatively unknown to famous contemporary artists such as ‘Stompin’ Tom Connors (“And the Bridge Came Tumblin’ Down”, a song about the collapse of Vancouver’s Second Narrows Bridge in 1957) and Gordon Lightfoot’s famous “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Incidents in songs range across time, from the pre-confederation era, such as the New Brunswick blaze of 1825 (“The Miramichi Fire,” credited to John Jardine), to the 2009 Cougar helicopter crash off Newfoundland (“Fall into the Ocean,” by Mark Frost).

Because of the large number of Canadian disaster songs we have already identified, we have had to limit our project for the time being.  We are limiting our scope to songs of Atlantic Canada since close to 80% of the Canadian disaster songs discovered so far are from that region.  Although we are keen to include songs in any language, it has been easiest to identify English-language songs, and these therefore constitute the majority of our collection.