ABSTRACT
If memorials help define place physically, marking the landscape as significant, then disaster songs help provide the necessary histories that imbue place with meaning. Disaster songs create a sense of place through voice, temporarily pausing other actions, constructing the event, memorializers, and the memorialized, and concretizing the event through sound. Singing offers a compelling means of enacting the “pause” that is essential for the creation of place from space. This chapter examines Atlantic Canada as a place to study disaster songs, considering its cultures of both vernacular and professional music-making. It analyzes how place and location are evoked in disaster songs. The chapter outlines key moments in the history of commercial songs about Atlantic Canadian disasters and discusses how a distinctive music culture in Atlantic Canada created the conditions in which disaster songwriting has flourished. It also discusses the significance of place and location to and in disaster songs themselves.
