Wreck and Ballad in Popular Culture
During the late 1940s, a parody of the ballad was sung that mocked the ties that the folk singer Pete Seeger had to the Communist Party. The lyrics began, "Well they gave him his orders up at Party headquarters, saying, 'Pete, you're way behind the times; this is not '38, it is 1947, there's been a change in that old Party line.'"
An episode of the Suspense radio program, broadcast on March 17, 1952, and starring Frank Lovejoy, was loosely based on the ballad, which appears in snatches throughout the play. The facts of the wreck are changed, however, eliminating all but one fireman, all but one mail car clerk, and adding two escaped killers.
The ballad was referenced in the song "Blood on the Coal", a folk parody song from A Mighty Wind, the mockumentary film from Christopher Guest. The reference seems to be a tribute to the ballad, although the wreck described in "Blood on the Coal" is an absurd one in which the train crashes into a coal mine.
In the movie The Blues Brothers, the band is handed a list of songs to play at a gig. While the band is cleaning up Elwood says, "Sorry we couldn't remember 'The Wreck of the Old 97'."
A version of the song, by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, is part of the ambient soundtrack to the video game Sid Meier's Railroads!
The popular alt-country band The Old 97s take their name from the ballad.
In Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Starlight Express, CB the Red Caboose claims that, among other things, "the state police they don't suspect I got Old 97 wrecked".
Read more about this topic: Wreck Of The Old 97
Famous quotes containing the words wreck and, wreck, ballad, popular and/or culture:
“The old man had heard that there was a wreck and knew most of the particulars, but he said that he had not been up there since it happened. It was the wrecked weed that concerned him most ... and those bodies were to him but other weeds which the tide cast up, but which were of no use to him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“And such the trust that still were mine,
Though stormy winds swept o’er the brine,
Or though the tempest’s fiery breath
Roused me from sleep to wreck and death.
In ocean cave, still safe with Thee
The germ of immortality!
And calm and peaceful shall I sleep,
Rocked in the cradle of the deep.”
—Emma Hart Willard (1787–1870)
“During the cattle drives, Texas cowboy music came into national significance. Its practical purpose is well known—it was used primarily to keep the herds quiet at night, for often a ballad sung loudly and continuously enough might prevent a stampede. However, the cowboy also sang because he liked to sing.... In this music of the range and trail is “the grayness of the prairies, the mournful minor note of a Texas norther, and a rhythm that fits the gait of the cowboy’s pony.””
—Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Party action should follow, not precede the creation of a dominant popular sentiment.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“All our civilization had meant nothing. The same culture that had nurtured the kindly enlightened people among whom I had been brought up, carried around with it war. Why should I not have known this? I did know it, but I did not believe it. I believed it as we believe we are going to die. Something that is to happen in some remote time.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)