Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought Book

You might think that popular music would avoid the subject of DEATH like the - well, the plague. I mean, it's kind of a downer. But it doesn't. Popular music always embraces death with a ghoulish relish. I'm looking far in my mind, Lord, I feel like I'm fixing to die. There's just one kind favour I'd ask of you. Please see that my grave is kept clean. He blew his mind out in a car. A crowd of people stood and stared. Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box. And who in solitude, who by barbiturate, who in your merry merry month of May? Who by very slow decay? Dock Boggs and later Camper van Beethoven imagined Death talking right at them -

I'll fix your feet so you can't walk
I'll lock your jaw so you can't talk
Close your eyes so you can't see,
This very hour, come go with me.

The Pogues, quoting the old children's schoolyard rhyme, reminded us that the worms crawl in thin but they crawl out stout.

Jacques Brel peered at his own funeral -

Oh I can see them now clutching a handkerchief
Discreetly asking how come he died so young

The singers, dozens of them, are eager to list all the myriad ways you might meet your sticky end: by trains (The Newmarket Wreck) and boats (When that Great Ship went Down) and planes (Deportees); by extreme weather (Florida Hurricane, The Cyclone of Rye Cove); by flood (When the Levee Breaks); by fire (The School House Fire); and by disease, all kinds - aids (Halloween Parade), tb (Whippin' that Old TB), syphilis (VD City); and by being unfortunate enough to earn your crust as a miner (Diglake Fields, The Gresford Disaster, The Caves of Jericho).

Children are not exempt from this morbid contemplation. Hank Williams produced two lamentations, The Funeral, a mawkish and weirdly moving recitation about a poor black child's funeral, and The First Fall of Snow (I bet you can imagine what that's about) which is just mawkish. In blues, death letters were received with terrifying regularity, they weren't asking the postman to look and see if there's a letter in your bag for me, instead

I grabbed my suitcase, went on down the road
When I got there she was laid on the cooling board

(that's what you do after you get a Death Letter).

In the 60s there was a craze for killing off boyfriends and girlfriends (Leader of the Pack, Give Us your Blessings, Ebony Eyes, El Paso, Paint it Black).

And I haven't even mentioned the murder ballads yet. So many of them beloved by the folk, that was you and me once. Let the Oxford Girl stand for them all, all the Pollys and Coreys and Marias

Look how she goes, look how she floats,
She's a-drowning on the tide,
And instead of her having a watery grave
She should have been my bride

Well, you shouldn't have catched up a stick from out the hedge and gently knocked her down, then. Too late now.

As well as documenting these cruel tricks of fate, the singers try to wrench some kind of meaning out of our terminal responses. They lecture us for our indifference (Lady in Green, A Most peculiar Man); they show how you can run but you can't hide (Ode to Billy Joe, I Can Never Go Home Anymore); and of course the Christians want to be always telling you of what's awaiting on you all. Some times for the Christians the vision is dreadful to behold (Death Don't Have No mercy, Death May Be Your Santa Claus, Pale Horse and his Rider), but sometimes it's seen as the gateway to paradise (When God comes and Gathers his Jewels, Death is only a Dream).

So everyone cops it in the end including…. Animals. Especially dogs. Singers love dead dogs (only Loudon Wainwright bothered with skunks) - and here is where I will end. Is there anything as heartfelt as Joe Jackson , his voice almost cracking, singing these lines about his old friend :

But old Blue died and I dug his grave.
I dug his grave with a silver spade.
I laid him down with a golden chain.
And at every link I called his name.
Go on Blue, you good dog, you.
Go on Blue, you good dog, you.