At 4 o’clock one evening
Of a warm September day
A great and mighty airship
From Lakehurst flew away . . .
When the U.S. Navy’s first rigid airship, the USS Shenandoah (ZR-1), hit turbulence, broke up, and crashed in Ohio on 3 September 1925, the tragedy inspired a song—and created a moment when U.S. naval history and American folk-music trends converged. “The Wreck of the Shenandoah,” the ballad, was released on the heels of the wreck of the Shenandoah, the incident. For this was the heyday of a morbid and prolific musical subgenre: the disaster ballad. In those pre-Internet, pre-24/7-news-feed days, such chronicles of awful events served to bring people together in collective grief. From “Titanic Blues” to “The Wreck of the Old ’97,” from “Altoona Freight Wreck” to “Ohio Prison Fire,” from “The Santa Barbara Earthquake” to “The Storm That Struck Miami,” the listening public in the early audio era was treated to a heapin’ helpin’ of sorrow-wallowing. So naturally, when the Shenandoah met her fate, how could a song not ensue?
For hours they bravely struggled
They worked with all their might
But the storm could not be conquered
And the ship gave up the fight.Her sides were torn asunder
Her cabin was torn down
The captain and his brave men
Crashed into the ground . . .
Pictured here, from the collection of Thomas A. Norris, are a couple of relics that recapture those days when tragic occurrences meant tunesmithing: the sheet music for “The Wreck of the Shenandoah” and a cylinder phonograph of the song, which was released on multiple labels and versions, one of which (the Victor recording) reached the top of the charts (at #6) in January 1926. It was another hit for Vernon Dalhart, whose earlier recording of “The Prisoner’s Song” had become the first million-selling country-music record. An erstwhile opera aspirant whose real name was Marion Try Slaughter (“Vernon” and “Dalhart” were Texas towns he grew up near), Dalhart did quite well trafficking in the traumatic, scoring hits with “The Wreck of the Old ’97,” “The Runaway Train,” and in addition to his Shenandoah requiem.
But this artifact seems anachronistic: a cylinder recording? In 1925? Hadn’t disc recordings rendered those old cylinders extinct by the 1920s? Actually, no. Just as people still listened to audiocassettes well into the age of CDs, and just as some diehards still buy CDs in this age of streaming music, the dying cylinder market managed to hang on tenaciously, overlapping the disc-record era until 1929, when cylinder manufacturing ceased. Like old cars parked next to new ones, obsolete technologies have a way of lingering into the present—and if a sample of some such forgotten format manages to survive the vicissitudes of time and tide, it just might find itself regarded as a treasure someday.
—Eric Mills
Watch a recording of one of these cylinders being played below: