Creepy songs

Subject: Lyr Add: THE LEGEND OF THE PALE-EYED COMPANION
From: GUEST,DWR
Date: 31 Aug 08 - 05:38 PM

I posted this back in '99, revived it because of another Lawrence Hammond song in '02. In the intervening years, we have found that Lawrence Hammond is a Medical Doctor in the Pacific Northwest.
^^
His telling of this is sufficiently creepy.

THE LEGEND OF THE PALE-EYED COMPANION
(Lawrence Hammond Desert Jewel Songs BMI, 1972)
as sung by Lawrence Hammond, Coyote's Dream, Takoma 1047, 1976

They say a New Mexico winter
will drive old Satan from his home
and the poor cowboy who's caught in the blizzard
well he knows that he's never alone

Cause the Devil's on the range in the winter
His eyes are the color of snow
And they call him the Pale-Eyed Companion
He's got the shape of a wolf 'round his soul

I ain't a man of superstition
But there are things beneath the sky
that can make a long-time cowboy
lay down in the cold snow to die

He feeds on the flames of your campfire
to stoke up the fires of his soul
And he'll creep up when the wind starts to howlin'
Lord he'll leave you at the mercy of the cold

Now a blizzard it caught me north of Clayton
I had fifty head to go up to Raton
The prairie dogs they froze down in their burrows
and every step another steer was gone

I ain't a man of superstition
But there was something caught their eye
that made them longhorns sure get edgy
when I built me a fire for the night

The blizzard it sang
The cowbells they rang
The note in the wind got so strange ...
When I turned 'round in fright
two eyes in the night
put the winter right into my veins

I drew out my rifle and I sighted
I whispered a prayer to the skies
But I found I could only stand and shiver
In the light of his pale snowy eyes

And them longhorns they'll die if you run them
too fast in the high drifted snow
But I saddled my pony and I drove them
just as fast as any longhorn can go

I ain't a man to run from danger
Many's the time I've walked Boot Hill
But the ghost of the Sangre de Christos
never blinked as he closed for the kill

I never have rightly remembered
how I rode myself in from the range
But I remember that trail boss a-swearin'
as I left just twenty head on his hands

I stayed drunk the rest of the winter
Now they say that I'm touched by the moon
But it's because there's a Pale-eyed Companion
who waits for me outside the saloon

Nobody wants a drunken cowboy
But whiskey's warm and friends are cold
Now they say I'm just tellin' stories
'Cause I rode them longhorns down in the snow . . .

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: Herga Kitty
Date: 31 Aug 08 - 06:54 PM

Kevin McG - there's the Halliard's version of THE WORKHOUSE BOY, too. Tim Edwards singing CHILD OWLET gives me goosebumps, though.

Kitty

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: alison
Date: 01 Sep 08 - 02:27 AM

Here's another one of those "dead guy gets you out of a fix" songs

CAMOUFLAGE by Stan Ridgeway. [Lyrics]

he was an awfully strange marine!!

anyone remember the one about the blue faced tribesmen with the cans?
its driving me nuts

slainte

alison

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: Willa
Date: 01 Sep 08 - 06:47 AM

LAMBKIN

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: Jayto
Date: 01 Sep 08 - 01:22 PM

Country singer Marty Brown had one on a CD back in the 80's called SHE'S GONE. I used to play with Marty some and his brother and I were good friends. Mike (his brother) told me that his Grandmother died and it really tore Marty up. Marty wrote it one night sitting by her grave. You can really sense the emotion in it and it is pretty creepy. It was released by MCA records and you can probably find it online. I haven't heard it for years so if you do find it and it is not as I remember, let me know. I remember back in the day though I thought it was really creepy. I loved it though. It was never released for airplay and to be truthful I can't believe Nashville would let him put it on a CD because it was in no way shape or form what commercial. Nashville is bad about killing anything that doesn't have a chance at airplay.

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: GUEST
Date: 01 Sep 08 - 01:45 PM

What you said in your post is true McGrath. I have been sitting here singing nursery rhymes to myself very slowly and they do sound pretty damned creepy. Also, THE WALKER OF THE SNOW/The Shadow Hunter mentioned in a previous thread on this topic is quite spine-chilling! I have never actually heard this song though and do not know the tune.

Amber

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: jacqui.c
Date: 01 Sep 08 - 01:48 PM

THE CROW ON THE CRADLE.

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: GUEST,redriveroldbroad
Date: 13 Nov 08 - 10:00 AM

re: SALLY GO ROUND THE ROSES - if memory serves me right, comes from an old English children's rhyme traced back to the plague or death in general and the origin of flowers at funerals to mask the smell in pre-embalming days - most children's rhymes when traced are pretty creepy

just heard "you think I'm psycho mama" for the first time on the radio and am trying to find the writer and/or singer - yanked me right out of my coffee and the times online morning routine

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: the pom
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 06:56 AM

How about DELIA'S GONE by Johnny Cash
Delia, Delia, Delia all my life
If I hadn't have shot poor Delia I'd have taken her for my wife.    REALLY?

Then it goes something like:- first time I shot her, shot her in the leg
Next time I shot her shot her in the head just to hear her beg...Gawd!

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: GUEST,Suffolk Miracle
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 07:12 AM

Biggest frissant I ever got from a folksong was in THE CRUEL MOTHER

One day she walked by her father's hall
And saw two bonny boys playing ball.
'Oh bonny boys if you had been mine
I'd have dressed you all in silk so fine'.
'Oh bloody woman, we once were thine
But we ne'er saw none of your silk so fine.
All we saw was your penknife
When you slit our throats and took our life'

If it doesn't work on the page, get the recording of Lucy Stewart singing it.

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: Piers Plowman
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 07:21 AM

"'Oh bloody woman, we once were thine"

That's no way to talk to your mother!

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: GUEST,Captain Colin.
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 07:52 AM

"DEATH COME CREEPING" would take some beating for creepiness I reckon.

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: CupOfTea
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 11:11 AM

The song that gives me the creeps the most intensely is Anne Lister's Song of the Knife. Part of the intensity comes from talking to Anne on a very hot day at Old Songs. As she told me how the song came to be written I went all over chilled in gooseflesh in startling contrast to the sullen mugginess of the day.

Almost any ghost or revenant songs are creepy in my book, but who sings them and how they're sung can amp up or down the creepy factor. Cindy Mangsen has a goodly stock of creepy songs she does, but her matter-of-fact delivery keeps them from making your hair stand up - they take some time to sink in, and you need to be listening carefully. Her version of THE WALKER OF THE SNOW is like that for me, yet when she and Anne Hills do LOST JIMMY WHELAN it's just as prettily sung, but the harmonies create a creepier mood.

Phil Cooper & Margaret Nelson (and later with Kate Early) have always done a good line in bloody murder & revenge ballads and can creep me out every time with DEATH OF YOUNG ANDREW or LORD ABORE AND MARY FLYNN, among dozens in their repertoire.

Joanne in Cleveland

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: GUEST,maple_leaf_boy
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 09:21 PM

I agree about "Mercy Seat". (At the end, when he says: "But I'm
afraid I told a lie." and with the rising intensity of the Cash
version. Throughout the lyrics, the narrator keeps saying that he
told the truth, and at the end, he says he lied; and when you
imagine about being in the chair. It's chilling.)

I'd have to say that Lead Belly singing "Goodnight Irene" can be
kind of creepy. He sings "I'll GET you in my dreams" rather than
"I'll SEE you in my dreams" as many other singers would sing that
phrase.

It makes you wonder what he means by "Getting" her in his dreams.
Get her as a lover?
Get revenge on her? / Catch her?
Get her as in understand her, like "Oh, I getcha."?

Does anybody know why he says he'll "get" her?

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: topical tom
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 09:39 PM

One of the creepiest songs of all-
"Bringing Mary Home" by Charlie Waller and the Country Gentlemen.

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: My guru always said
Date: 15 Nov 08 - 03:55 AM

JENNY GREENTEETH by Nicole Murray of Cloudstreet is a good one! I've sung it during a couple of power-cuts at Clubs and it worked so well that occasionally we turn the lights off when I sing it!

Subject: Lyr Add: ALL OF MY LIFE (Steve Earle)
From: Brian Peters
Date: 15 Nov 08 - 07:06 AM

Agree that 'The Well Below the Valley' is seriously creepy, not least because of the jaunty tune. I'll second 'Lamkin', too - it always used to scare me witless when I sang it.

Has no-one mentioned 'LUCY WAN' yet?

For a modern one, how about this from Steve Earle? It's followed on the disc by 'Over Yonder', a song about a man on Death Row which humanises the condemned killer. The combination of the two tracks really makes you think...


ALL OF MY LIFE
(Steve Earle)

I guess I don't get out too much
If it wasn't enough I hear all these voices
Always tellin' me that I'm bad
But it's all in my head - like all those scary noises

chorus
I've been waiting all of my life
All of my life
I've been waiting all of my life
All of my life

Some nights when I'm laying in bed
Wish I was dead - and I know you'd never miss me
But I know where you go when you dream
Strange as that seems 'cause I never even kissed you

chorus

Everybody wants to be somebody's somethin'
Ain't nobody wants to be blue
Ain't nobody anywhere ever loved nothin'
Half as much as I love you
Somebody somewhere said "love is a prison"
But no one really wants to be free
I'd have to be crazy to ever think someone
Could love a nobody like me

I'm here alone in the dark
But I know where you are
'Cause I can hear you breathin'
Come a little closer you'll find
You were meant to be mine
'Cause you're the only reason

chorus

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 15 Nov 08 - 08:06 AM

In The Pines or Black Girl

Is a brilliantly creepy song fatB****rd. Heard it performed at Blackmore (in exile) club by Lanfranc.

I am going to seek that one out now.

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: reggie miles
Date: 15 Nov 08 - 11:49 AM

Don't know if creepy is the right adjective to describe these two, The Devil and Grosssosity but it may be as close as I come in my writing attempts in that direction. Each of these can be found online to listen to as MP3s at my EZ Folk site. http://ezfolk.com/audio/bands/143/music.php

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: John Hardly
Date: 15 Nov 08 - 12:16 PM

This gives me the creeps when I can finally stop laughing.

[Another dead link! Please give us song titles, folks! I could have fixed the link if I had known what song was meant!--A Mudelf.]

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: Mrs Scarecrow
Date: 15 Nov 08 - 01:28 PM

'When you're in your beds at night
Who knows where the scarecrow goes'

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: Jayto
Date: 15 Nov 08 - 02:46 PM

All of my life by Steve Earle was actually written for the remake of the movie Psycho. Vince Vaughn played Norman Bates and it was released a while back now. So it being creepy is right on target. I agree lyrically it is creepy.

I think What's he builing in there? by Tom Waits is creepy especially with that video. Someone said that Waits was the paranoid one and nothing was really up with his neighbor. To me that is the creepy part of it. It could happen to anyone. You are going about your daily business and some paranoid freak is convinced you are up to something and has acquired an obsession about what they think you are up to. That is creepy I think. Then again I have had stalkers. If you are lucky enough to never have one this song may not hit you the same way.

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: GUEST,Volgadon
Date: 16 Nov 08 - 08:37 AM

Long Lankin. Shudders.

Subject: Lyr Add: ANNIE (parody:Bob Kanefsky/Fred Small)
From: oldhippie
Date: 16 Nov 08 - 08:20 PM

This parody of Fred Small's song by Bob Kanefsky fits the bill.

ANNIE (parody)

Annie's up at seven on a work day,
Blinking at the sun, recently set.
A quick check for mail from her terminal
Hooked to the net.

Writing esoteric kinds of software:
Cross-compilers, decryption, and more.
All the folks in the biz will tell you she's a wiz,
But her co-workers whisper near her door,

Saying,

«Chorus:»

What we gonna do about Annie?
Pretty little thing, looking so petite,
Shouldn't work through the night.
She needs fresh air and sunlight.
And when does she find time to eat ?

Christmas comes with questions of families.
How did they raise you, and where?
Avoiding any question that would date her,
She asks them why they care.

Looking for some dinner in the City,
An extra wisp of fog that no one heeds.
Man or woman, what the heck. It's only a neck.
Sixteen ounces — that's all she needs.

Tell me,
«Chorus»

Never getting too close to a mirror.
Never letting down too much of her hair.
Nor allowing guests to see the bedroom furniture
Hid in her lair.

Annie walks in late to the Christmas party.
Her friends tell her, looking disturbed,
"You're so pale and so thin. Why not splurge and dig in?
Why, the garlic bread's simply superb!"

Thinking,

«Chorus»

Work that you love is hard to come by,
And places where they let you work at night.
So she grabs a couple morsels to be quietly
Tucked out of sight.

But at dawn, as she flaps toward her coffin,
She glares back at the cold angry glow,
And dreams of the day, many decades away,
When the world will be ready to know.

She'll tell them:

Chorus: Don't you worry about Annie.
She won't waste away to bone.
If she stays out of the sun,
She may live to be five hundred.
Annie's stronger than you'd known.

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: GUEST
Date: 01 May 09 - 03:08 PM

I once did a version of "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" from the Sound of Music in the style of Leonard Cohen in a folk club. That went down well, as you can imagine!

Subject: RE: Creepy songs
From: Gurney
Date: 01 May 09 - 04:21 PM

I gave my niece Tawney's 'Children's Songs from Devon and Cornwall' when she was little. The scream at the end of 'LADY ALL SKIN AND BONES'(?) so frightened her that she played it just once!

Subject: Lyr Add: DEVIL'S HOOTENANNY
From: lompocan
Date: 01 May 09 - 04:26 PM

I got these lyrics from youtube. I know nothing of the performer, but it was creepy enough for me to cut/paste the lyrics.

Devil's Hootenanny

I was walking through the snow
When I saw a distant glow
Of a farmhouse nestled down beneath the trees
With a guitar on my back
I thought it sure can't hurt to ask
If I could stay the night
And sing a pretty song for free

I walked up to the house
And then I knocked hard on the door
That old dark piece of wood
She fell right in there on the floor
And as she did a fire burst out on all sides
I wondered what the hell was going on inside

Then the music that I heard
It was bizarre, it was absurd
Like no banjo fiddle bass I'd ever seen
I stepped into a room of flames
Shook my head and looked again
It was the kind of company to make you scream

It was a devil's hootenanny
An old-time fire band
A drunken whiskey choir singing
Round me you understand
And then they said, "We've been searching near and far
For a thing like you to sing and play guitar"