April 14 marks the anniversary of three awful, fabled events: the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865; the Titanic striking an iceberg in 1912 (it sunk in the wee hours of the 15th); and the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935. Gillian Welch first brought attention to this foreboding historical confluence on her 2001 album Time (The Revelator), which has two songs chronicling the events of April 14: “April the 14th, Part 1” and “Ruination Day, Part 2.” I caught up with Welch to discuss how she first made the connection, and how the songs in question came about.
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How did you become aware that these three events occurred on the same day? Was the confluence immediately meaningful to you?
I can’t remember which I knew first, but it was probably the Woody Guthrie song “Dust Storm Disaster,” that goes “on the 14th day of April… there came the greatest dust storm the world had ever known….er, ever filled the sky.” So that’s probably the first one I knew, and that’s considered the worst storm in American history. I think they call it Black Sunday. I’d known that one since I was a kid.
When Dave [David Rawlings, Welch’s musical partner and co-writer of Time (The Revelator)] and I first started working together I was listening to a lot of Blind Willie Johnson, who does “God Moves on the Water,” and that has a lyric that goes “year of nineteen hundred and twelve, April the fourteenth day.” When I made that connection I was like wow, crazy, the Titanic hit the iceberg on the same day as the dust storm. Bad day.
What about Lincoln’s assassination?
It wasn’t until 1998 or 1999, when I was living in a little shack of a house in Nashville. It was like an old slave quarters, and I was always sick when I lived there. So I was sick, and I had a ten-inch black and white TV, and I had it up next to the bed and I was lying in bed watching a PBS documentary on Lincoln. It got to the part where he was shot and they said “on April the 14th…” and I freaked out. I really thought it was very sinister; I think it’s how some people feel when they see a ghost. I got completely freaked out, got all cold and shivered, and I think I started yelling for Dave. It hadn’t occurred to me to write about it until I got to that third event. It was in the body of working on “April the 14th” and “Ruination Day,”—which were first one song and then kind of split apart into two songs—that I spat out the phrase “ruination day,” and then that was that.
Lifeboats of the RMS Titanic. Photo by Wikimedia Commons