Blog
A Song in Any Other Language
A quick look through this site might suggest that I am only collecting English-language disaster songs, but that is not the case. If you look carefully, you’ll find songs in…
Licensing Music for Educational Purposes
I have thrown myself in the deep end and decided to develop a museum exhibit about Nova Scotia mining disaster songs. I really know nothing about exhibit development, but I…
Disaster Song “Templates”
With more than 500 songs in my database now, I can see that there is a typical disaster song, what I call a “template.” A significant number of disaster songs…
On Collecting Disaster Songs
A few people have asked how we found the songs in our collection. My colleague, Joe Scanlon, who initiated the project, began with a thread on the excellent online folk…
Soundless Songs?
I have to say that I’ve been surprised but delighted to find that this website consistently gets hundreds of hits each month, often as many as a thousand. So I…
Website Updates
Happy new year! To start the year, I want to (re)introduce the disastersongs.ca website. I’ve been working with a new designer, Marc Musial, to update the site to make it…
Songs from Central Newfoundland
I was recently interviewed by CBC in Gander and, in preparation, came up with a list of songs from central NL. I thought that some people might be interested in…
Sago Disaster Songs
Hi everyone! I’m one of Heather Sparling’s research assistants this summer and have been working on this disaster songs project with her. Last week, under Heather’s direction, I began searching…
What is a Disaster? – Part 2
Making decisions about what songs to include or exclude in this project has certainly illuminated how challenging it can be to draw firm lines around a definition. We have to…
What is a Disaster?
One cannot talk about disaster songs without understanding what we mean by “disaster.” Not surprisingly, this is a complex and contested question amongst academics. First, it is important to understand…