Balladeers sang to the tune of local disasters

Newspapers have always written about the nation’s disasters -- but so have balladeers, enshrining death and heroism and crime in songs about virtually every newsworthy event: the 1889 Johnstown flood, the last train ride of engineer Casey Jones, the sinking of the Titanic.

These songs were popularized in sheet music and phonograph records, and some of the mournful tunes later wound up on the radio.

Southern California has had banner-headline disasters and crimes aplenty -- and its own share of songs inspired by events here. Among them were the Santa Barbara earthquake of 1925, the murder of 12-year-old Marion Parker in 1927, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam in 1928, and the frantic efforts to free little Kathy Fiscus from an underground water pipe in 1949, a vain attempt broadcast live on local television, then a rarity.

Edward “Ted” English, 79, of Atascadero is a collector of such disaster songs. But he prefers the term “event ballads.” “It’s not such a negative term and sounds a lot nicer,” English said in a recent interview.

English, who says he also has a passion for gospel music, has scores of records in a collection that spans decades of disaster headlines. One of the earliest in English’s collection is the classic 1924 train song “The Wreck of the Southern Old 97.”

“Train wrecks and people trapped underground were always news,” said English, a Beverly Hills insurance broker who retired in 1997.

The attempted rescue of Kentucky spelunker Floyd Collins from a cave in 1925 generated an early media frenzy, English said. It was memorialized in the ballad “The Death of Floyd Collins,” which became a huge hit as a 78-rpm single that same year for singer Vernon Dalhart -- one of the first country performers to achieve national recognition.

“Dalhart recorded popular 78s under at least 100 different names,” English said, including a ballad he recorded soon after the 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake, which claimed 11 lives and flattened much of the downtown area:

Way out in California

Among the hills too tall

Stands the town of Santa

Barbara

That they thought would never

fall . . .

There were wives and children

screaming and dying

everywhere

And the people were praying

“Oh, Lord, please hear our

prayer.”

The annals of child kidnapping are replete with heartbreaking tragedies, but probably none has been quite so bizarre as the 1927 killing of Marion Parker. The daughter of a Los Angeles banker, she was kidnapped for ransom by a psychopath named William “the Fox” Hickman, who collected the ransom, then, a few hundred feet away, shoved her body, with its arms and legs cut off, from his car, according to news accounts.

The following month, Dalhart recorded a song about the tragedy that included these lines:

They had a little daughter

A sweet and flirty child

And the folks who knew her

Loved Marion Parker’s smile

She left her home one mornin’

For school not far away

And no one dreamed that

danger

Could come to her that day.

On March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam -- a 200-foot-high concrete wall -- crumpled and collapsed, sending 12 billion gallons of water down San Francisquito Canyon, north of Saugus, and killing at least 450 people.

The water flooded whole towns, and within a month, singer John McGhee recorded “The Breaking of the St. Francis Dam”:

Night had fallen o’er the valley

Of Santa Clara’s verdant green

Suddenly a cry of anguish

Broke upon the peaceful scene

When a tide of angry water

Rushing from St. Francis Dam

Wrecking homes with all their

loved ones

Spreading sorrow o’er the

land.

In the spring of 1949, 3 1/2 -year-old Kathy Fiscus went to play in a San Marino field near her home with her sister and a cousin. She fell through a 14-inch-wide hole and slipped nearly 100 feet down, into an abandoned water pipe.

She disappeared at the dawn of the television era, and for 27 hours, KTLA preempted its regular programming to report live from the scene -- a first in local television.

Not long after rescue workers recovered her body, radio personality and singer Jimmie Osborne recorded “The Death of Little Kathy Fiscus,” which sold more than 1 million copies, according to English.

Osborne reportedly gave most of the profits to the Fiscus family, English said.

On April the 8th, the year

forty-nine

Death claimed a little child, so

pure and so fine.

Kathy they called her met her

doom that day

I know it was God that called

her away.

Playmates with Kathy were all

havin’ fun

The story was told, they all

started to run.

And as they looked back, she

wasn’t there

It’s so sad to think of this tragic

affair.

Disaster songs also cropped up in later decades.

The death of actress Marilyn Monroe in 1962 prompted “The Ballad of Marilyn Monroe.” A major oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969 brought forth “ReUnion Oil Song,” and the 1974 kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst led to “The Kidnapping of Patty Hearst.”

And the storytelling tradition is alive and well in country music.

“Country records still tell a story,” English said.

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cecilia.rasmussen@latimes.com

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