The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #115485 Message #2472742
Posted By: Malcolm Douglas
22-Oct-08 - 10:21 AM
Thread Name: Songs About Necrophilia
Subject: RE: Songs About Necrophilia
There will certainly be modern songs, but none, I think, from English-language tradition. Necrophilia is a well-defined term (it doesn't mean merely having sex with somebody who just happens to be dead, but being sexually attracted -whether in theory or practice- to the dead because they are dead), and in the occasional ballad in which somebody has, or may be assumed to have, sexual relations with a revenant, they are never aware at the time that their lover isn't technically alive; so those don't count.
If the person who asked you was misusing the word simply to mean 'sexual relations with somebody who later turns out to have been dead', then there's 'Sweet William's Ghost' and its Irish broadside derivative 'Willy O', arguably. The motif occasionally turns up in forms of 'The Grey Cock', but in those cases it has invariably been imported from another song; 'The Grey Cock' isn't natively a supernatural ballad at all, but an ordinary night-visiting song.