So, I’m a huge fan of the TV show Due South, and one episode featured the rather cool Paul Gross song “32 Down on the Robert MacKenzie”, a song inspired by the real-life loss of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a Great Lakes freighter that sank during a storm in 1975.
Any other songs based on real life losses of ships, trains, planes, big trucks, airships, largeish cargo-carrying avians, etc.?
There’s Gordon Lightfoot’s song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, and Harry Chapin’s “30,0000 Pounds of Bananas” (a truck accident). James Taylor did “Fire and Rain” in reference to a woman who’d died in a plane wreck. Those are the only ones that come to me at the moment.
Of course there is Blood On The Coal about how 'Ole 97 went in the wrong hole at 7:25 on April 27 in the year of 91.
A poem rather than a song, but there’s William McGonagall’s notorious ode on the Tay Bridge Disaster:
(sorry)
“My Heart Will Go On” - Celine Dion.
Its about the Titanic sinking and stuff. And she’s really sad about it because she knew someone who was on the ship and she was really sad when he didn’t make it. But she’s gonna keep living anyway.
Or something like that.
The Ellen Vannin Tragedy, a cheerful little ditty which includes the line ‘This little ship was bound for hell’.
For some reason we used to sing at summer camp. Maybe the counsellors liked songs about shipwrecks.
Not exactly.
That song is currently featuring heavily on my ipod playlist. It’s great!
Well, there is always this collection:
The Wreck of Old No 97
He was rolling down that grade
Doing ninety miles an hour
When the whistle broke into a scream.
They found him in the wreck
With his hand on the throttle
And scalded to death by the steam
Nobody did this one better than Tex Ritter.
Curse you! I only came in here to post that (I’m sorry to say). 
It’s hard to listen to “Ride Sally Ride” and not think about the Challenger disaster.
It’s hard to listen to “Try to Remember” & “My City of Ruins” and not think about 9/11.
"Driving that train . . . " 
There a many on the Titanic. One I like is “God Moved On the Waters” by Woodchuck’s Revenge. There’s also Jaime Brockett’s “Ballad of the USS Titanic,” but that’s somewhat less historically accurate.
“Smoke on the Water” is about a real hotel fire.
Woody Guthrie: Sinking of the Rueben James
Woody Guthrie: When that Great Ship Went Down
Well I think they are real life shipwrecks.
I guess thats Reuben James
The Pogues and The Wake of The Medusa.
Another great one by Woody Guthrie: Plane Wreck At Los Gatos (Deportee)
Alas, that link goes to Snopes. I don’t go to that website, as it opens a popup advertising window, which I find supremely annoying. But this motivated me to check Wikipedia, where I found this:
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_and_Rain)
Is that the same thing Snopes says? So much for my long-held belief that it referred to a fan of Taylor’s.