Such restraint! Last year, Tompkins Square Records released People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Songs of Disaster 1913-1938, and it’s…brutally great, actually. This blog may just end up a song-for-song annotation of this collection pulled together by Christopher King and Hank Sapoznik, who at the very least had strong enough radar to recruit Tom Waits to write an introduction. It’s attractive for many reasons, but not least of which is that it promised the juxtaposition of really good stuff with really atrocious, spun-from-the-minds-of-opportunists-and-or-moralists dreck.

So let’s start with the dreck: Bob Miller’s “Ohio Prison Fire,” a way, way overwrought – but nonetheless jaunty – take on what was evidently a gruesome scene back there in Ohio. Replete with a weepy, spoken melodrama piece in the middle, of course. Those “poor, charred bodies,” she says. “Bodies, bodies, bodies!!” She can’t stand it, she says, but nonetheless also can’t seem to stfu about em.

Anyway, here we have a cautionary folk tale¹ by one “Bob Miller” about an historic penitentiary fire and it’s pretty easy to position it at…the what?! The Burnham Square Condominiums in Columbus, OH?! Condos, right? Of course! As in hey-you-bouge-your-French-Press-coffee-maker-just-leaked-Kenyan-bean-juice-all-over-the-charred-bones-of-a-once-proud-pre-maybe-post-industrial-rapist.

Actually, the bones are there either way, so what’s a little yuppie coffee juice going to harm.

MAPPING IT

It’s in Ohio. Was.

HEARING IT

Not on Spotify. Free copy.