Ballads of death and destruction

When someone with as impeccable taste as Tom Waits’ agrees to write the introduction to an album, chances are it’s going to be worth your time listening to it -- and “People Take Warning!” is most certainly worth it.

The three-disc set from Tompkins Square Records is a marvelous collection of recordings from the 1920s and 1930s about natural disasters, murders and other tragedies.

Though some of the artists, including Ernest “Pop” Stoneman, Charley Patton, Uncle Dave Macon and Son House are known to students of country music and the blues, most of the recording artists in the set are largely unknown. But that doesn’t matter because the set isn’t about individual musicians as much as it is about a musical tradition -- one that Bob Dylan has frequently promoted and drawn from.

When asked about songwriting over the years, Dylan has often stressed listening to as much good folk music as you can, including Scottish and English balladeers -- and you can hear that tradition in such Dylan commentary songs as “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and “Hurricane.” In “High Water (for Charley Patton)” from his inspired 2001 “Love and Theft” album, Dylan even tipped his hat to one of the songs in the new package.

In fact, “People Take Warning!” is such a valuable primer for folk, rock and country songwriters that it deserves a place alongside Harry Smith’s landmark 1952 “Anthology of American Folk Music.”

Here’s part of what Waits has to say about the album:

“In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Depression gripped the nation. It was a time when songs were tools for living. A whole community would turn out to mourn the loss of a member and to sow their songs like seeds. This collection is a wild garden grown from those seeds.

“These are plain-speaking folks singing their graveside testimonials in somber respect and simple melody, as if their purging left no time to labor over the compositions. Or sometimes words are set to an old tune because a melody already in circulation said it best.”

Various artists

“People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938”

(Tompkins Square)

The back story: In the liner notes, Hank Sapoznik ties the colorful history of catastrophe songs to British settlers who brought with them ballads that documented tragic occurrences -- fires, floods and murders. The style became especially popular in the South.

The commercial breakthrough came in 1925, when a song called “The Death of Floyd Collins” gained enormous exposure as the flip side of a massive hit by Vernon Dalhart titled “The Prisoner’s Song.” The song was based on the story of a Kentucky man who was trapped and died while exploring a cave in 1925. Written by Andrew Jenkins, it includes the lines: “Oh, come all you young people, and listen while I tell / The fate of Floyd Collins, a lad we all knew well / His face was fair and handsome, his heart was true and brave / His body now lies sleeping in a lonely sandstone cave.”

Thanks to that recording, Sapoznik writes, “the easygoing casual exploitation songs of a previous era gave way to a mini-industry of singers and composers rushing out any song with the words “death,” “fate, “wreck” or “murder” in the title.

Not surprisingly, several of the songs on the first disc, which is devoted to tales of man versus machine, dealt with the sinking of the Titanic. The songs look at the tragedy in different ways. “El Mole Rachamim (fur Titanik),” which was recorded by a cantor, offers a prayer in Yiddish for Jewish victims, while Stoneman’s “The Titanic” spoke about the sinking as being simply God’s will. Disc 1 also includes the Skilet Lickers’ “Wreck of the Old Southern 97,” a song that became one of Johnny Cash’s signature numbers in concert.

The second disc deals with man versus nature and the massive Mississippi River flood of 1927, which displaced more than 700,000 people and killed nearly 250 and is a recurring subject. Patton, one of the first great blues artists, was a witness to the flood’s rampage, and he recorded “High Water Everywhere” in two parts. In the second version, he sings, “The water was rising in my friend’s door / Some man said, to his womenfolk, ‘Lord, we’d better go!’ ”

The third disc is devoted to songs about man versus man (or sometimes women) and includes tales of murder and prison executions. It includes early recordings of such oft-told tales as “Frankie and Johnny” and “Casey Jones.” The set, produced by Christopher King and Sapoznik, was nominated for a Grammy in the historical album category but lost earlier this month to a live Woody Guthrie recording.

Backtracking, a biweekly feature, highlights CD reissues and other historical pop items.