Words & Music
June 2012
The Crying Game: In search of the saddest songs
Is it a contradiction to say that sad songs make me happy? For I like nothing more than to feel my heart plunge and soar on the back of a sweeping melody and a devastating lyric. It’s a fascination that over the years has led me to some of the most beautiful and most tragic songs ever written. Songs I’m always eager to share with other musical miserablists, preferably in a round or two of what we call the Crying Game; a friendly competition in which each competitor tries to out-sad the others by playing the most heartbreaking song of all.
The first salvos fired in any such game are the romantic love songs, the tearjerkers we turn to when love goes wrong. I Will Always Love You and Nothing Compares 2 U are solid if predictable openers best followed by the likes of Roy Orbison and George Jones, two velvet voices with a myriad of tear-stained songs capable of soothing a broken heart and stealing some early points in any competition. Play loudly with a bottle of red and a boxful of tissues.
In his 1999 lecture on the Love Song, Nick Cave argued that all true love songs are sad songs, ‘For the Love Song is never truly happy. It must… embrace the potential for pain.’ Cave goes on to explain the role of duende, the ‘eerie and inexplicable sadness’ he regards as essential to any love song. For a writer who ‘refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love’.
Is it duende that lends a bittersweet, existential ache to Somewhere Over The Rainbow or to the songs of Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and of course Nick Cave himself? As an emotional language music is highly developed, with the vocabulary to express virtually every nuance of feeling, but the mechanism by which it does so remains largely a mystery. That is to say, we know that major chords can make us feel happier and more positive than their darker and sadder minor chord cousins, but we don’t really understand how. Certain songs seem to ‘strike a chord’ with us, bringing comfort and reassurance that we are not alone by giving voice to our innermost feelings.
Waits once said he liked ‘beautiful melodies telling me terrible things’, an apt description for bereavement songs like Hank Williams’ Six More Miles To The Graveyard or Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven, for few things could be more traumatic than the loss of a family member. Clapton’s song about the death of his young son packs an emotional wallop. As does John Lennon’s My Mummy’s Dead, a fractured nursery rhyme of a song recorded at home for his first solo album.
Both songs are therapeutic, allowing their authors and us the opportunity to grieve, to sing away a little of the pain and start the healing process.
For those looking to gain the upper hand in a sad song competition the bereavement song is a wise choice, but a combination bereavement/romantic love song can deliver an even more powerful blow, as in the case of Gloomy Sunday. The notorious ‘Hungarian Suicide Song’ from the mid-30s about a lover’s death which was said to be so beautifully sorrowful it could drive those who heard it to suicide.
Little white flowers will never awaken you
Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you
Gloomy Sunday
Billie Holiday recorded a version in the 40s before the song was purportedly banned in Hungary, America and England amid reports of multiple suicides, with the BBC only lifting its ban in 2002. The suicides were never verified, perhaps more urban myth than reality, but for the sad exception of the song’s author, RezsÅ‘ Seress, who did indeed take his own life in 1968.
Finally, there is a category of sad songs that will trump all that have gone before it. The songs born of injustice and inhumanity that hold a mirror to a shameful past. Songs like Archie Roach’s Took The Children Away (the subject of last month’s Words & Music), the slavery-era American spiritual No More Auction Block For Me, and one of the saddest songs of all, Strange Fruit. Strange Fruit is a beautiful and bitter horror story about the lynching of African Americans in America’s South, written by Abel Meeropol and made famous, once again, by Billie Holiday.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves, blood on the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
This is the kind of song that could win you the Crying Game with a knock out blow of heartrending proportions. A song that stands as sorry witness to the darker side of human nature. For what could be sadder than our own wretchedness?
Phil Kakulas is a songwriter and musician who plays double bass in The Blackeyed Susans.
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