According to singer-songwriter Gillian Welch, today is Ruination Day because of three horrible events:
1.) The assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865
2.) The RMS Titanic hitting an iceberg in 1912 & sinking
3.) The Black Sunday dust storm in 1935.
On her 2001 album Time (The Revelator) she mentions them in two songs you can listen to at YouTube - April the 14th Part I and Ruination Day Part II. Part I ends with:
“....Ruination Day and the sky was red.
I went back to work, and back to bed.
And the iceberg broke, and the Okies fled,
And the Great Emancipator took a bullet in the back of the head.”
Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris, and Alison Kraus also were the voices of The Sirens in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?
On a happier note, today we also celebrate the birthdays of country singer-songwriter Loretta Lynn (1932), baseball player Pete Rose (1941), and actress Sarah Michelle Gellar (1977).
An image by Carol M. Highsmith of the statue in the Lincoln Memorial came from the Library of Congress.
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