“It’s the End, Boys”

It’s said by many people to be a myth: that the band members assembled on board the deck of the RMS Titanic as she went down in the North Atlantic played the 19th-century hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Yet that was the story reported by more than a single survivor of the horrific shipwreck. And it was the inspiration for one of the most memorable scenes in the 1958 film A Night to Remember--a scene more or less re-created in James Cameron’s Oscar-winning 1997 movie, Titanic.

The Titanic vanished beneath the water’s surface at 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, leaving behind lifeboats and floating deck chairs and people screaming into the moonless night. With that same hour now upon us (albeit, in a different time zone), I am posting the “Nearer My God, to Thee” scene from A Night to Remember.