Non-Fiction songs. Examples?

[mhendo]

@OtakuLoki

I don’t know if the “Rasputin” mentioned by mhendo is the same score/lyrics as that used by Boiled in Lead for their “Rasputin,” but theirs is certainly based on the real Mad Monk.

Yeah, the Boiled in Lead version was a cover of Boney M’s song.

You should try to get hold of a copy of the original. It’s a lot of fun, in the euro disco style that Boney M was known for.

[Jeff_Lichtman]

Stack O’Lee Blues was based on a real incident in which Lee Sheldon shot William Lyons after an argument in which Lyons snatched Sheldon’s hat from his head. After the shooting Sheldon picked up his hat and walked away. The incident was reported in the December 28, 1895 issue of the St. Louis Globe Democrat.

The Death of Floyd Collins was about a fellow who got trapped in a narrow space in a cave and eventually died despite attempts to rescue him. The rescue attempts got a lot of publicity at the time - it’s one of the earliest examples of a media frenzy.

There are many songs about the sinking of the Titanic. The best-known one - called The Great Titanic - seems to be a folk song, and has become a campfire song standard. It has the line, “It was sad when that great ship went down.” Vernon Dalhart recorded it - he specialized in disaster songs (his biggest hit was The Wreck of the Old 97).

Marching Through Georgia by Henry Clay work celebrated Sherman’s march to the sea in the American Civil War. It’s one of the few war songs I know of that actually gloats.

[jackelope]

Frank Black (formerly known as Black Francis, of the Pixies) wrote a song about the St. Francis Dam disaster. Cleverly, it’s called “St. Francis Dam Disaster.”

[Larry_Mudd]

@Squink

Woody Guthrie’s The Grand Coulee Dam is a nice one.

The bulk of Woody Guthrie’s songbook is documentary – and much of it works much better than encyclopaedia articles when it comes to commiting things to memory.

Two Good Men (a Long Time Gone) is a nice concise encapsulation of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and I doubt that I’d remember the names of the principals if it weren’t for Woody:

Judge Thayer told his friends around
That he’d cut the radicals down.
“Anarchist bastard” was the name
Judge Thayer gave these two good men.

I’ll tell you the prosecutors’ names:
Katzman, Adams, Williams, Kane.
The judge and lawyers strutted down,
They played more tricks than circus clowns.

Canadian folkie “Stompin’” Tom Connors has quite a few non-fiction songs. A lot are about shipwrecks and mining disasters and whatnot, but the one that’s closest to home for me is “The Bridge Came Tumblin’ Down,” which is about the 1958 disaster during the construction of the Second Narrows Bridge (which connects Vancouver to the North Shore) which killed 19 men. The bridge is now officially called the Ironworker’s Memorial Bridge, but practically nobody calls it that, which is kind of sad.

He’s also got a song about Erica Nordby, imaginatively titled “Erica Nordby.” It’s about how miraculous it is that a little two-year-old girl survived after wandering outside in her nightdress during an Edmonton winter, back around 2000 or 2001. -20 below, and her heart had stopped by the time she was found. They managed to bring her back from the edge at the hospital, though-- around two hours after her heart stopped. (No word on how she’s doing now, but I have a feeling it’s not the stuff glurgy lyrics are made of.)

There’s a pretty grim and sad traditional ballad about the Halifax Explosion, called simply “The Halifax Explosion.”

Houses were crushed like paper, people were killed like flies,
The coroner’s record tells us the toll was twelve hundred lives,
Two thousand were maimed and wounded, hundreds more lost their sight
And God knows how many children were alone in the world that night.

From the north to Rockhead Hospital and west to the exhibition grounds
There wasn’t anything living and not a single sound,
The streets were filled with debris, with dying and with dead,
There lies a little baby’s hand, there an old man’s head.

As a sort of topical digression, there’s a silly controversy this year over the annual gift of a Christmas tree that Halifax sends to “spruce up” Boston Common as a gesture of gratitude for all the support back in 1917. :smack:

[EllisDee]

Similar to Alice’s Restaurant, in that it is a recounting of a personal anecdote (of a band member, or a band’s member, or both), Stevie’s Spanking by Frank Zappa is a non-fiction story song.

[Cartooniverse]

@Zebra

The Philosopher Song?

Many songs are written about the personal experiences of the song writer. You’re So Vain, You otta Know, She Said She Said, Norwegian Wood.

True, but unless most of the listening public has actually fucked Warren Beatty, “You’re So Vain” wouldn’t really fit the criteria, would it?

Then again, it IS Warren Beatty. So one never knows.

Cartooniverse

[Polycarp]

@Dung Beetle

30,000 Pounds of Bananas! by Harry Chapin.

Add in “A Better Place to Be.” I was at a concert in my home town where Harry told the origin of that song; I’ve been to the bar described several times, and a now-dead neighbor worked at the tool-and-die-works mentioned in it.

[elfkin477]

“West Memphis Moon” by Chuck Prophet is an acount of these murders.

[Idlewild]

“Hello Birmingham” by Ani Difranco is about the murder of Dr. Bernard Slepian, a doctor who provided abortions in Buffalo, Difranco’s hometown.

[phungi]

Roads To Moscow by Al Stewart

[Cliffy]

If it hasn’t been mentioned already (or even if it has), Filter’s “Hey Man, Nice Shot” is about the suicide of Pennsylvania state senator Budd Dwyer on live television.

–Cliffy