Without reading all through this post I wonder if anyone has mentioned 'Gloomy Sunday', a song so sad it was blamed for several suicides. For myself, I find the situations expressed in some songs bring me to tears. The English music hall song 'My Old Dutch' is about a couple married for 40 years, "and it don't seem a day to much" being taken to the workhouse. Albert Chevalier, the artist who popularised the song had a backdrop showing the workhouse gates with seperate entrances for men and women, reminding his audiences that separation of couples was the normal practise at that time. The thought of being parted from my own 'old Dutch' fills me with dread so I find this song unutterably sad. Further to this, two Ewan MacColl songs greatly affect me. 'My Old Man' because it so closely corresponds to the life of MY 'old man', and 'The Joy of Living' because of the circumstances that lead to it being written - Ewan,a life-long hill climber and rambler, found towards the end of his life that a favourite climb was now too much for him, aging and with heart problems. He wrote the song as a farewell to the things he had loved, and, I am sure, to those he loved but hadn't always been able to express this to. In the lyric he calls his wife "Dearest Companion", a most beautiful phrase, and he told his children "Farewell my chicks, now you must fly alone". My wife and I think of our son and his children as 'our chicks' and know that we'll never see the full extent of their flight through life, so we are greatly touched by this phrase. It has been said that the task of a poet is to make clear to us something that we always knew. Those last three songs have that effect in the Burl household. God bless our poets. God bless music