words and music blog

Titanic Blues

April 15, 2018 

My grandmother's uncle in Belfast died at sea 106 years ago today.

Hugh Fitzpatrick worked as a boilermaker at the Harland & Wolff shipyards, where he helped build the RMS Titanic, while going to engineering school at night. Leaving his pregnant wife behind, Hugh served on the crew that brought the ship from Belfast to Southampton. On April 6, 1912, he signed on as crew for its maiden passage to America. As the Titanic's Junior Boilermaker, he worked down in the hot, dark bowels of the doomed beast.

In the wake of the news of the tragedy, countless folk songs, blues, ballads, and parlour songs were written about the Titanic.

In the wake of the news of the tragedy, countless folk songs, blues, ballads, and parlour songs were written about the Titanic. I've long been obsessed with this odd little sub-genre of American music, and fascinated with the thought of blues musicians in the early 20th century writing songs, in effect, about my uncle.  

Here is my version of "Titanic Blues," recorded by Hi Henry Brown in 1932 (but which I first learned from a Phil Alvin record). Following in the folk and blues tradition, I added a couple original verses to honor the workers in the engine and boiler rooms, so often excluded from the accounts of rich survivors — as invisible in death as they were en route.

The engineers and boilermakers, knowing they remained with the ship, kept the steam going for the pumps and generators, buying the passengers above an hour of light and time to deploy lifeboats (such as they were). Hugh was one of two boilermakers on board, floating on-call to repair and service the giant machines. Surely his skills were put to use in shutting down the flooded boiler rooms, while keeping the furnaces working in the others, as the great ship slipped further into the inevitable deep.  

Some firemen, greasers and trimmers made it to the vacant decks, although only a handful survived; the bulk drowned, or froze first. None of the engineers or boilermakers — working tirelessly against time and their own fate until the end — lived to tell the details of their heroic deeds. They may have drowned, or been crushed, or scalded alive by the intense steam when the icy Atlantic hit the fiery boilers.

Uncle Hugh's body was not recovered.  

In the words of Alfred Smith, a greaser and rare engine room survivor: "I was told to go up and see how things were, and made my way up a dummy funnel to the bridge deck. By that time all the boats had left the ship, yet everyone in the engine-room was at his post. I was near the captain and heard him say, ‘Well boys, it’s every man for himself now.’”

It is unlikely Captain Smith's final order reached the brave souls still below. It would have made no difference.

When I was in Belfast in 2004, I saw the giant yellow H&W cranes looming over the city, and the Titanic memorial, where I ran my finger along the name of my great-great-uncle, recorded in granite stone, as black as ink.