On Tragedy Songs

Complaining about the current state of the pop charts is useless. Frankly, there’s no glimmer of hope; the body snatchers took over long ago. Besides, you don’t need a finger-wagging lecture about the evils of mass-marketing, so I’ll go straight to my point: There’s too much jollity. Granted, with social unrest and the threat of economic meltdown, we need reasons to be cheerful; and when no relief is found, a chipper pop tune is always a welcome palliative. But there are too many of those. If Justin Bieber and Carly Rae Jepsen are the soundtrack of our lives, we might as well put on rose-colored headphones and join a cult. I recall a time when misery was readily found around the dial, so bear with me as I take a look back at tragedy songs.

Tragedy songs deal with subjects we try to avoid, mainly death and other forms of calamity. They’ve always been around. All shades of human emotion are portrayed in folk music, and people look for solace in hard times. Songs about murder, disasters, and public hangings serve as medium for catharsis. This is a common thread found in musical traditions around the globe. Yet mainstream pop charts gave no exposure to tragedy songs. Two songs turned the tide in 1958: Jody Reynolds’ Endless Sleep and The Kingston Trio’s Tom Dooley. The former is a rockabilly ballad written by Reynolds that is big on atmosphere, with a first-person account of a man who finds the corpse of his drowned girlfriend. The latter is an old murder ballad based on real events. It has a grim last verse that reads: "This time tomorrow, reckon where I’ll be, down in some lonesome valley, hangin’ from a white oak tree."

Record companies took notice when these party poopers reached the top of the charts. In 1959, Lloyd Price dusted the cobwebs off Stagger Lee, a 1910’s folk song, and made it a #1 hit. It seemed revenge and murder were acceptable to the buying public as long as the tune had a danceable beat. The floodgates opened later that year with the release of Mark Dinning’s Teen Angel. This was the prototype for the glut of teenage death songs that followed, with its sticky melodrama about a car stalled over railroad tracks, an oncoming train, and a boneheaded girlfriend who goes back to retrieve a high school ring. Not quite Cole Porter, the song still raised obscene amounts of cash and had producers scrambling to ape the formula.

Suicide, tragic accidents, and ghostly apparitions were now bankable subjects. Some notable songs around this period were Tell Laura I Love Her (Ray Peterson) and Chapel Bells Ringing (Gene Summers). Dickey Lee scored twice with Patches, a suicide song, and Laurie (Strange Things Happen), a ghost-dating tune. Even established artists such as Pat Boone and The Everly Brothers jumped on the bandwagon with Moody River and Ebony Eyes respectively. Back in the UK, producer Joe Meek spooked the airways with the eerie Johnny Remember Me. This was the heyday of gloom.

Why were these songs so popular? Let’s face it, the grim darkness of death appeals to teenagers. Complaints from civic-minded citizen only drew attention to these songs. Adolescence is a period of self-exploration and heightened emotions. As a teenager builds a personal identity, a taste for the morbid helps make sense of the world. It should also be said that music has always been used to accompany courtship. Back then, a Hammer film and these tunes on the car radio could get you some backseat action.

President Kennedy’s assassination put a damper on the trend, but not for long. 1964 saw a pile-up of vehicle crash songs with the release of Last Kiss (J.Frank Wilson and The Cavaliers), Terry (Twinkle), and the cinematic Leader Of The Pack (The Shangri-Las). Jan and Dean lived an irony-free existence until they recorded Dead Man’s Curve. Two years later, Jan Berry would crash his Corvette at the very same spot. He survived the wreck with brain damage and partial paralysis, which curtailed the duo’s career.

By the mid-sixties, the teenage dead song had run its course, but songwriters upped the ante on despair. Humanity itself was now in peril, as witnessed by Barry McGuire’s pamphleteering Eve Of Destruction. Zager and Evans’ dystopian In The Year 2525 seemed an apt prophesy in 1968: a time of riots, war, and infamous assassinations.

Most people remember the Bee Gees as purveyors of chipmunk-cheeked disco, but in the late sixties they were a gloomy bunch. Mournful ballads like New York Mining Disaster, 1941 made them a hit among depressives. Their most saccharine is I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You, about an inmate’s plea to send a message to his girlfriend before his execution. Weaned on this, a young generation grew up to expect grand gestures, only to find conservatives in power.

With the Vietnam War raging on, a negative fog hung around the early seventies. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was the feel-bad album of 1970, with tracks about childhood abandonment and mental distress. There was also a disquieting craving for violence all around. Bloodrock’s D.O.A. was a gruesome account of a plane crash. Many good parties were ruined every time some jackass played this.

Alice Cooper’s singles were fit for general audiences, but their LP tracks kept FM stations lively with bratty songs about killers and decapitations. In contrast, there was no gallows humor in Black Sabbath’s music, which was basically downer stuff. The group became pied pipers for teenage morbidity with songs about war, paranoia and despair. When not beheading doves, Ozzy Osbourne kept a modicum of distance from his lyrics, but became the bane of parents just the same. The tradition of heavy metal musicians being sued over their lyrics started with him.

Singer-songwriters made a new generation of record buyers wallow in pain. Gilbert O’Sullivan’s Alone Again (Naturally) and Don McLean’s Vincent tackled suicide painlessly. Gordon Lightfoot wrote The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald in Dorian mode. Clocking at six minutes plus, it’s a snoozefest. Elvis’ death made 1977 a banner year for tribute songs, but by then the jig was up. Punk and new wave swept tragedy songs off the charts. Songs like Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer introduced an element of detachment that was fresh, so melodrama was out. Punk music, as a whole, was life-affirming and defiant – no obstacle was taken lying down. Rap followed this precept for a while before turning into a pissing contest.

The Smiths gave tragedy songs a new spin in the eighties, striding a fine line between homage and send-up. The pursuit of wretchedness is carried on nowadays by bands like Radiohead, who don’t need the airways to sell units, and that’s a real shame.

Today, artists leave the drama for their videos. Teenagers have their fantasy games and movies, and any contact between these forms and actual human emotion is merely coincidental. Therein lies the problem. Maybe we’ve stared at our own decadence for so long that we’re giving up the fight.

In this changing world, we need music more than ever. But it’s not there to inoculate us; it’s there to express our inner feelings, be it joy or sorrow. I’m not asking for much, just some passion up there in the charts to remind us, every now and then, that we still got a pulse.