It was late that night, the car was stalled
Upon a railroad track–
I pulled you out and we were safe,
But you went running back.
Teenage death songs of the era were all particularly glurgy. Here are a couple more in the same vein:
Ray Peterson’s “Tell Laura I Love Her” (1960) dealt with Tommy entering a stock car race to win the prize money so he could buy Laura a wedding ring. He crashes and dies, but that’s not the end of the song–Laura later hears his voice in the chapel where she prays for him.
And “Last Kiss,” originally made popular by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers in 1964, was another car crash song. This time, the girl is badly injured, but not so badly that she cannot ask her boyfriend to hold her for a little while. He does, and they kiss one last time. Now she’s gone to heaven and the narrator-singer’s “got to be good, so I can see my baby when I leave this world.”
“Timothy” by the Buoys is pretty glurgy. Guys trapped in a mine and have to resort to canabalism. Yep, standard teenage pop angst for the kids. (Thanks for nothing, Rupert Holmes) Some suggested later that Timothy was a mule…
“Chestnut Mare” by the Byrds is incredibly awful. “I’m going to catch the horse if I can, And when I do I’ll give her my brand. And we’ll be friends for life, she’ll be just like a wife, I’m going to catch that horse if I can” wretches into waste basket
Come on. No way is ‘Timothy’ glurge. Now, I will accept The Gambler, since he refused to take it back, but Timothy I draw the line at. Way too dark to be glurge.
This thread raises the interesting issue of what is glurge and what is genuinely moving. Ultimately, I guess, this is subjective… on the one hand, there are some people who will be repulsed by any song that attempts to be moving; on the other, the very existence of the kind of songs being mentioned in this thread indicates that there are many people who have no glurge-meter whatsoever.
Here is a song that I find genuinely moving but that many people will certainly be glurged out by:
(On reflection, I think my glurge-meter has a different setting for folk music. A lot of folk songs are pretty glurgey, but somehow I don’t mind it as much.)
Wildfire is not that tough to suss out, but you do need the lyrics in front of you. Woman loved riding a horse. Woman dies one winter. Horse freaks, and bolts. Guy plants stuff but a killing frost comes, and he knows his number’s up. He figures he and his woman are going to ride off all ghosty on Wildfire together.
I came in to post “Honey”. “Men in My Little Girl’s Life” wins the thread, though, I think.
I like the reference to early 60s death songs. What a sick & twisted bunch those guys were, and must’ve caused tons of parental hand-wringing over this obsession with Death. Makes this generation look like Up With People.
