Let's start the week on a cheery note -- songs about Death! (Maybe second only to Love as a song subject)

[fireford]

He spoke with tears of fifteen years how his dog and him
Traveled about
The dog up and died
He up and died
After twenty years he still grieves

 

[Zorro]

Three of the greatest murder ballads ever written were all based (loosely, of course) on actual incidents that happened in one town, St. Louis, over a ten-year period in the late 1800s; Stackolee, Frankie and Johnny and Duncan and Brady. Here is Tom Rush's version of stackolee. I will see if i can find good recordings of the others.

 

[Zorro]

 

[Zorro]

Actually, Frankie did not get the chair, she copped a self-defense plea and died in 1944 in an insane asylum. So it goes.

 

[Bama fan]

Early Johnny Cash:

 

[Scud49]

James Brown......one great, great, song with one helluva message:

 

[Scud49]

Toy Caldwell's steel guitar....love it:

"Dance hall girls were the evenin' treat
Empty cartridges and blood lined the gutters of the street
Men were shot down for the sake of fun
Or just to hear the noise of their .44 guns"....

 

[Zorro]

Blood on the Saddle; TEx Ritter

 

[Bigboote]

Although the evidence doesn't support it, many believe Richard Farina's death at the age of 29 in 1966 to be a suicide. This song is a piece of evidence they use to support this; he supposedly says goodbye to Bob Dylan in it.

 

[Bigboote]

This one, like the earlier folk songs, is based on a true event:

 

[Hoops66]

I hesitate but here goes....(the dorm loved it)

 

[Hoops66]

Although the evidence doesn't support it, many believe Richard Farina's death at the age of 29 in 1966 to be a suicide. This song is a piece of evidence they use to support this; he supposedly says goodbye to Bob Dylan in it.

And the late Mimi Farina was Joan Baez' younger sister. She passed a number of years ago.

 

[Bigboote]

Seven Widows Weep by Sirenia. The absolutely amazing vocal begins about a minute in.

 

[quavik]

This is a very sad song about two deaths: