Ballad of the Yarmouth Castle (by Gordon Lightfoot)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwRHTy4WCQs&feature=related
Ballad Of The Yarmouth Castle
by Gordon Lightfoot
from "Sunday Concert"
(United Artists, 1969)

(Am) Well, it's four o'clock in the (C) afternoon
The (G) anchors have been weighed
From Mi(Am)ami to (G)Nassau
She's (Am) bound across the waves
She's heading south through (C) Biscayne Bay
In(G)to the open sea
Yarmouth (Am) Castle, she's a-(G)dying and don't (Am) know it

Now the many years she's been to sea
She's seen the better times
She gives a groan of protest
As they cast away her lines
And the grumble of her engines
And the rust along her spine
Tells the Castle she's too old to be sailing
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>>>>>>>>>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Morro_Castle_(1930)
Excerpt:
The SS Morro Castle was a luxury cruise ship of the 1930s that was built for the Ward Line for runs between New York City and Havana, Cuba. The Morro Castle was named for the Morro Castle fortress that guards the entrance to Havana Bay.
In the early morning hours of Saturday, 8 September 1934, en route from Havana to New York, the ship caught fire and burned, killing a total of 137 passengers and crew members. The ship eventually beached herself near Asbury Park, New Jersey and remained there for several months until she was towed off and scrapped.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Noronic
Excerpt:
The death toll from the Noronic disaster was never precisely determined. It ranges anywhere from 118 to 139 deaths. Most died from either suffocation or burns. Some died from being trampled or from leaping off the upper decks onto the pier. Only one person drowned. To the anger of many, all of those killed were passengers.
A Federal inquiry was formed by Canada’s House of Commons to investigate the accident. The fire was determined to have started in the linen closet on C-deck, but the cause was never discovered. It was deemed likely that a cigarette was carelessly dropped by a member of the laundry staff.

The burned-out hull of the Noronic

The high death toll was blamed largely on the ineptitude and cowardice of the crew. Too few crew members were on duty at the time of the fire, and none attempted to wake the passengers. Also, many crew members fled the ship at the first alarm, and no member of the crew ever called the fire department. Passengers had never been informed of evacuation routes or procedures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_General_Slocum
Excerpt:
An estimated 1,021 of the 1,342 people on board died. The General Slocum disaster was the New York area's worst disaster in terms of loss of life until the September 11, 2001 attacks.^[2] The events surrounding the General Slocum fire have appeared in a number of books, plays and movies.

http://www.newsouthernview.com/pages/nsv_wht_iron_mountain.html
Excerpt:

Whatever Happened to the Steamboat Iron Mountain

article by Bill Pitts
Background image copyright © Cartography Associates

The Mississippi River, America’s watery highway, has seen more than its share of riverboat accidents, what with the many ways a ship could meet its end. An overworked boiler might explode, showering the flammable wooden boat, its cargo, crew, and passengers with burning coal, white hot shards of metal, and scalding steam. A snag might rip out the bottom of the hull, sending a boat plunging to the muddy bottom of the powerful, roiling river. And then there is the constantly changing channel of the river itself, ready to throw up a new sandbar to catch a careless river pilot unawares with a shallow stretch of water, or a new bypass where there once had been solid land.

Shown in this wood engraving, the steamer Stonewall burns on the Mississippi River on the night of October 28, 1869, with a loss of about two hundred passengers — one vivid example of the dangers facing a steam boat plying the waters of the Western Rivers.

The Mississippi River has many such stories of steamboat tragedies but there is one in particular
that has no clear cut explanation as to what really happened, although some may claim otherwise.

In March of 1882, the stern-wheeler Iron Mountain was moving barrels of molasses and four barges laden with cotton up river—by some accounts down river. She docked at the river city of Vicksburg, Mississippi to take on supplies before continuing on—an uneventful trip so far—one of many.

The Iron Mountain was afloat for only ten years when she sailed into the world of the mysterious, or at least the curious.
Photo courtesy of Jerry Canavit

One hundred and eighty-one feet long, thirty-five feet wide, and about ninety feet tall from her shallow-draft keel to the top of her twin smoke stacks, the Iron Mountain was not a small steamboat by any stretch of the imagination. And she had been only ten years on the river, having been completed in 1872 on the Ohio River at Pittsburgh. Constructed for Gray’s Iron Line, she was the first steamer on the inland waterways of the Western Rivers (as the Mississippi and her tributaries were called then) to have boilers made entirely from steel. Prior to this, all steam ships’ boilers were made from cast iron. There were five of them, and each boiler measured forty inches in diameter and were twenty-six feet long, with a pressure output of one hundred and seventy pounds per square inch of live steam.

There are several versions as to what happened on that voyage. Fifty-five passengers and crew were onboard, and two hours out of Vicksburg another steamer, the Iroquois Chief, came close to meeting her own end when she almost collided with the four barges that the Iron Mountain had been towing. They were drifting with the current, clearly a hazard to other ships, clearly an indication that some accident had befallen the Iron Mountain for her barges to be running loose on the river this way.

Some say she struck an obstruction in the river and sank quickly, taking all on board down with her. Others claim that the lines holding the barges had been deliberately cut, a sure sign of a problem. Yet another account has her starting to sink, and passengers and crew seeking safety on the barges she was towing. In some stories, the vessel disappeared completely, swallowed up by the mighty river. Other reports of minor pieces of wreckage having turned up on the Louisiana side of the river are common. River pirates also come into play—it is speculated that they boarded the steamer and killed everyone aboard. A current theory blames the boat’s disappearance on a “time slip,” a rent in the fabric of space-time. Sounds more like a rent in the fabric of logic!

The riverfront at Vicksburg, Mississippi, where the Iron Mountain was last seen, was a busy place in the late 19th Century.
Photo courtesy Library of Congress

Almost one hundred years later in 1977, the Army Corps of Engineers published a booklet entitled “Historic Names and Places on the Lower Mississippi River.” The Iron Mountain accident is included and the fact that this occurrence generated several of the above mentioned legends is discussed. According to the booklet, the steamer did run upon a snag, and passengers and crew made it to safety as the boat started to sink.

When a group of the boat’s officers went to check on the wreck the following day, they could not find it. The Iron Mountain had indeed vanished! But not for any arcane or mysterious reasons—the boat had simply floated downriver. This loss was reported and the officers and crew found themselves positions on other steam boats.

A couple of months later, the Iron Mountain was located. Apparently, as a result of the 1882 flood, the wreck of the Iron Mountain had been carried through a break in a levee on the Louisiana side of the river near present-day Omega Landing and deposited in the middle of a field by the receding flood waters!

This explanation certainly clears up the mystery of the disappearance of the Iron Mountain. But it also brings another one to mind — how is it possible that, for several months, no one spotted a one hundred and eighty foot long Mississippi River steam boat sitting in the middle of a flat field?!

Known as “Uncle Sam’s Tooth Pullers,” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers snag boats made the waterways of the country safer by removing trees and other debris that littered navigable rivers. U.S. Snag Boat No. 2, the Heliopolis, removes a tree trunk from a river channel in this engraving.
Courtesy of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Rock & Roll Heaven (Bobby Darrin mentioned) ...cal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d5gzohHtYk&feature=related

'another' Rock & Roll Heaven
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2cijNKu9qc
Rock and Roll Heaven -- A music video tribute to the rock music heroes who have passed away. The soundtrack is "Rock and Roll Heaven" (Stevenson/O'day) is a new demo recording, sung by Ronnie Kimball, with reworked lyrics from the 1970's Righteous Brothers hit.

Artists featured in the video are: john lennon, jimi hendrix, roy orbison, don mclean, american pie, music video, rockers, otis redding, freddie mercury, janis joplin, jim morrison, marc bolan, george harrison, Bon Scott, Buddy Holly, Sonny and Cher, Johnny Cash, Denny martin, Bob Marley, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Jeff buckley, Kelly Clarkson, The Beatles, Wendy O Williams, Rob Palmer, Sonny Bono, Kurt Cobain

Video conceived, produced, compiled and edited by Sebastian Prooth. A Melting Clock Production, August 2006. Please visit the producer's website at

I Love Rock & Roll Joan Jett
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JuD9umfGo8&feature=related

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Dee
Excerpt:
Illness and death
Dee's adult years were marked by ill health. She admitted that for most of her life she battled anorexia nervosa, depression and alcoholism. In 2000 it was reported that she had been diagnosed with several ailments, including throat cancer and kidney disease. Complications from kidney disease led to her death on February 20, 2005, at the Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, California.^[8]
Sandra Dee is interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Hollywood Hills, not far from her mother, Mary C. Douvan, who died on December 27, 1987. She is survived by her son, her daughter-in-law and two granddaughters.

[edit] In popular culture

One of the popular songs of the Broadway musical and 1978 movie Grease is "Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee", in which the rebellious Rizzo satirizes new girl Sandie's clean cut image, likened to Sandra Dee's.
Dee's life with Bobby Darin was dramatized in the 2004 film Beyond the Sea, in which Kevin Spacey played Darin and Dee was played by Kate Bosworth.
Sandra Dee is referenced as a sex symbol in Mötley Crüe's song "Come On and Dance" from the album Too Fast For Love.

She is mentioned in Waylon Jennings' 1980 hit "I Ain't Living Long Like This" in the third verse where Angel the road house queen is compared to Texas Ruby and also mentioned in Felix da Housecat's song "Everyone Is Someone In L.A."

Everyone Is Someone In L.A.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EAUUkGlUL8
Lyrics:
Look at these stars just you and me
Living our lives like sandra dIts enough sites on the Hollywood sign
All night parties filled with alkaline
Shopping all day on Rodeo Drive
Out all night just to stay alive
People working hard making dreams come true
Palm trees lined up the avenue

Sandra Dee & Ricky Nelson

http://www.carpatho-rusyn.org/fame/dee.htm
Excerpt:
Many people who have seen "Grease" believe that Sandra Dee is simply the character depicted in "Grease." Little do they know that a real Sandra Dee actually exists.
The real Sandra Dee was a well-known Hollywood movie actress during the early 1960s. In fact, she was born in 1942 as Alexandra Zuck into a Carpatho-Rusyn (Lemkian) family in Bayonne, New Jersey. Her grandparents, Akym Van'ko and Aleksander Cymbaljak, were natives of the Lemkian Region (now in southeastern Poland) who immigrated to the United States before World War 1 and who were for many years members of the Lemko Sojuz in Yonkers, New York. The pretty, blond-haired, blue eyed Alexandra began her career as Sandra Dee already as a model at the age of 12 for a leading agency in New York City. Three years later she played in her first film, and in 1957 signed a long-term contract with United-lnternational Pictures in Hollywood. From 1960 to 1967, she was married to the popular singer Bobby Darin.

Grease I'm Sandra Dee
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y5M7G097v8
Grease, I'm Sandra Dee wit greek subs (Rizo singing)

Look at me, I'm Sandra DeeLousy with virginity
Won't go to bed 'til I'm legally wed
I can't; I'm Sandra DeeWatch it! Hey I'm Doris Day
I was not brought up that way
Won't come across,
Even Rock Hudson lost
His heart to Doris Day

Mötley Crüe
Took my love
Into overdrive
Custom pink
Tonight you'll pay the price
When she's hot
Well, damn she's hot
Electric love
Like Sandra DeeShould have seen her dance

[Chorus]
Come on and dance
Come on baby
Come on and dance
[2]
Fast and slick
Well she's cool and clean
In a pepsi sheen
She's a leather tease
When she's on top
Well, you can't be stopped
Watch her scream
Watch her suck you clean
And you should've seen her dance

WAYLON JENNINGS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b6dEOCGEak
"I Ain't Living Long Like This"

I look for trouble and i found it son

Straight down the barrel of a lawman's gun

I tried to run but i don't think i can

You make one move and you're a dead man friend

Ain't living long like this