Popular songs written or performed as a response to disasters, display characteristics and have functions that vary in accordance with the type of disaster and have evolved to meet changes in how the news is distributed and how tragedy is dealt with on a societal level, as well as changing aesthetics as to how such events are appropriately handled in the arts. Parlor songs and broadside ballads of the 19^th century reflect the ideal of the sublime prominent in Romanticism. African American disaster songs and Event Songs solicited from rural Southern populations in the 1920’s show the influence of the earlier songs and ballads while reflecting the Pentecostal and Evangelical religious traditions common to those communities at that time. Songs about coal mining disasters reflect the religiosity of those communities and the relevant issues of occupational justice. Recent disaster songs carry on the role of the genre in expressing grief and mourning, seeking explanations, and memorializing victims as well as educating listeners about past tragedies.