After I suggested Stephen Foster’s Beautiful Dreamer as one reminding me of a movie (Mighty Joe Young, in this case. What? You think I’d pick Jezebel or The Secret Life of Walter Mitty?) I looked it up, and found this on Wikipedia:
…AND MAY ACTUALLY BE DEAD
Boy, that puts a different spin on that song.
“I Dream of Jeannie”, too.
I have to admit, I’d never considered that, and probably wouldn’t even have thought of it, even reading the lyrics. It’s easy to forget that life expectancy was lower and the mortality rate much higher as recently as the end of the 19th century. They had lots of photos of dead children and poems and essays lamenting the lost, and the same factors affected young adults as well as kids.
Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones features a part where Mick is singing to a dead partner (“ No more will my green sea/Go turn a deeper blue/I could not foresee this thing/Happening to you”).
True, but the part I quoted is the only part where he’s singing directly to her (at least, the only part where he’s addressing her directly). The rest of it always sounded to me like he was taking about her, but not to her.
“Don’t, This Way” by The 77s—I don’t know whether it’s necessarily addressed to a dead lover, but that’s one reasonable interpretation.
Don’t leave this way, so many words unsaid
Don’t lie this way, stretched straight from feet to head
Don’t look this way, closed eyes, unmoving lips
Don’t feel this way, cold hands and fingertips
Sorry I thought it was an old song from the early 1900s.
My mother used to sing it to me.
Her you go from the internet:
The “Little Rosewood Casket” is a traditional folk song, with the earliest known version credited to songwriters Louis Goullaud and Charles A. White from Boston, who wrote it around 1870; the song is about a dying person leaving behind love letters in a small rosewood casket, signifying the sentimental value of their memories
