ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses broader sociocultural influences. Macro-level patterns emerge from reading and interpreting vernacular memorials and disaster songs along with their contexts. The chapter focuses on how a changing death culture, one particularly affected and inflected by the decline of Christianity and the rise of secularism, has created a need for new death rituals and practices. Because there is little scholarship that specifically addresses death culture in eastern Canada, it presents the author's observations as empirical evidence arising out of personal experience, a fundamental quality of fieldwork. The chapter focuses on fatalistic expressions and imagery of a Christian afterlife since these are so prevalent in disaster songs, particularly those written prior to about 1960. It also focuses on broad sociocultural pressures and trends that impact disaster songwriting. Disaster songs are particularly apt vehicles through which to articulate fatalism, as the metaphysical need to be “saved” from sin maps onto a much more direct and urgent need to save someone’s life.
