Songs You Can't Sing for Crying

Subject: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 06:08 AM

This was touched on (perhaps) in the Big Boys Ballads thread, but as no ballad has ever made me choke up with tears whilst singing it (the occasional lump in the throat perhaps) I thought it might be worth a thread on its own.

Time was, I could never get through Bellamy's setting of Danny Deever without cracking up; lately its been Ford O' Kabul River, which I've re-imagined as a doddering old colonel, circa 1960, in his dotage, thinking back to the events of that fateful night in 1879 - about the only thing he can remember, vividly, as he sits by his roaring fire in his crumbling country pile, whilst without the storms roar and the England he fought for steadily goes to the dogs...

The worst one, however, is Hamish Henderson's Banks of Sicily - this never fails to make me a blubbering wreck, stiff upper lip and all, in its depictions of the essential humanity that arises in situations of unimaginable (for me) adversity.

All war songs. Odd that.

What's yours?

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Stower
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 06:12 AM

I can now sing Lady Diamond in public. But it took me several months of practice before I could sing it without my voice cracking. I had to keep leaving it and coming back to it. Even now the thought of that story fills me with emotion. It's a similar story to lots of other songs, of course, but in Lady Diamond there is something about the way the story is told that just gets me.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: My guru always said
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 06:14 AM

It took me a LONG time to be able to sing 'the Dutchman' without crying. First time out I failed, but the room helped me through!

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Little Robyn
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 06:18 AM

Eric Bogle's No-man's Land. Also The Band played Waltzing Matilda.
Robyn

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: kendall
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 06:26 AM

After 25 years I got to where I could sing The Band Played Waltzing Matilda.
Others were:
The Wheelhouse Door.
Ashes on the sea.

I dont sing at all anymore but The Jeannie C did it to me too.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 06:45 AM

Band Played WM 4 me too!

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 06:50 AM

Another one for purely personal reasons. Fair & Tender Ladies — I have a v nice photo of me singing it at a party in 1958. Whenever my wife showed that pic to anybody she would say "As the flash went off for that photograph it flashed thru my mine 'That's the young man I'm going to marry'"; & so she did - for nearly ½-century. And now she's dead. And so I can't sing it any more for tears. And here they come now...

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Smedley
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 07:26 AM

You'll get us all crying if you tell stories like that, M.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: MartinRyan
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 07:34 AM

A few years ago, I started using the first verse of Lorca's lament for a bullfighter as a lead-in to a version of the Spanish Civil War song The Valley of Jarama. Even now, I can't finish it without tears in my eyes.

Regards

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: GUEST,suegorgeous (away)
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 07:42 AM

Kilkelly, Ireland
Widdecombe Fair (SOH, that is)

Yet sometimes it depends entirely on who's doing the singing. I've occasionally been moved to tears by a song that's never made me cry before, just because of how it's been sung.

Alhough I can quite see why Waltzing Matilda would induce tears, never does it for me.

MtheGM - ah, they're the saddest kind. I can't hear Time After Time without shedding a brief tear for my long-separated ex (even though we're very happily separated!)

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: sciencegeek
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 07:48 AM

As a kid, I could never make it through the theme song Exadus without choking... haven't sung it for years... wonder if it would still happen?

"Taps" will get me if I don't steel myself first. I sang that and Land O the Leal at my brother's memorial... about wiped me out.

But good point about war songs... the senseless preventable loss.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: AllisonA(Animaterra)
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 08:01 AM

Some years ago there was a thread entitled "Singing through the tears" on this topic, and lots of wonderful folks posted songs. I can't get the forum search function to work for me, but maybe someone else can find it.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 08:02 AM

Anything that makes me think of my daughter Andie.

Only Remembered This is Coope, Boyse and Simpson and very nice, but I like the No Worries version better.

Beulah Land Andie's 12 year old harmony was nicer. I cannot sing it without it catching in my throat.

Bedlam Boys because I remember Andie learning it when she was 15. Her excitement in sharing it with me.

Loch Lomond because I can't hear it without remembering Andie teaching a handful of giggling teenage girls in medieval garb to sing in different parts at an SCA event.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Murray MacLeod
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 08:38 AM

For me, it's

Richard Thompson's "How Can I ever be Simple Again"

Jed Strunk "A Daisy a Day"

John Austin Marshall "Dancing at Whitsun"

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: RTim
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 08:39 AM

Si Kahn's - Here is My Home.
I recorded it on a CD, and since I have not been able to sing it live.
I now live in the USA and my 2 children from my first marriage and their children still live in the UK, and all I think of is them when I try to sing it.

Tim Radford

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: kendall
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 09:03 AM

If you never feel like this when you sing or hear a really sad song, you are missing something or stuffing it.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Alaska Mike
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 09:23 AM

When I was 7, my older brother Pete died of pneumonia. Some 35 odd years later I wrote a song about him. I had tears running down my cheeks throughout the writing and didn't dare sing it in public for the next 6 to 8 months for fear of blubbering on stage. It is still my favorite of all the songs I have written, and it still makes me glow inside with his memory.

Mike

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: GUEST,mauvepink
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 09:36 AM

I have found several songs extremely hard to sing initially. Something about the meshing of the tune and the words as they hit deeper into me. "No man's land" was one, with "A town I loved so well" another. "Christmas Eve 1914" amd "Margarita" two more. Many songs deeply move me to tears and it takes a while to get through that emotional level before I can progress to singing them in full.

A couple of songs I have written myself also do it. They were written as poems for other people I love and care about. I then set tunes to them. It was hard to get through them and, on some days, still are. But I would not be without those feelings for anything.

My emotions and tears tell me I am alive. The singer/songwriter that can reach into my soul is to be admired. I cry at films a lot too lol!

I WANT music to reach in and do this to me. I love classical music and bel canto opera for the same reasons. It's the running out of tissues I hate...

;-)

mp

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: SunrayFC
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 09:55 AM

Sometimes when I hear people sing I cry.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Bat Goddess
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 09:55 AM

For years I had trouble learning "Dancing At Whitsun" -- I'd tear up. Just the thought of all those villages with all the men wiped out in that horrible war, before the powers that be learned that if a battalion or regiment were made up of men from one location, if that group were obliterated, that meant all the men from that home location were lost -- leaving the widows and the children to carry on the traditions.

Linn

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 10:23 AM

Actually, the ballads (so far) do affect me - though mainly on first learning. The Great Selkie can still catch me, especially when singing it while in the bath and imagining myself as the young woman standing upon this far flung rock at Sule Skerry while she's contemplating diving into the waves crashing about her.. "I'll drown myself at Sule Skerry"

But such mythic images and archetypal fairytale scenes seem to cut more deeply for me, than more mundane tales.

The bit where King Orfeo persues his bride and waits for seven years in the green wood to become overgrown with it, keeps catching me out..

Blubbing proper? I don't know that anything has reduced me to inconsolable sobbing of late.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Gillie
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 10:24 AM

Absent Friends all ways does it for me!

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Tim Leaning
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 10:36 AM

Almost anything I sing has that effect on the audience.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: topical tom
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 10:46 AM

My first two choices would be identical to Little Robyn's and I would add "Once I Rode An Orphan Train" by David Massengill and "Christmas in the Trenches" by John McCutcheon. They bring tears to my eyes without fail.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Carol
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 11:10 AM

A song that I taped my mother singing, for me to learn - to sing for the oldies, she said. I worked in sheltered housing and she was 70+ at the time, it's When I leave the World Behind, I think by Irving Berlin.
Also a song about WW1 by Debbie Cooke called the First Time.
I love Here is my home and How can I keep from Singing but just feel soppy,emotional after singing them!!

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Paul Burke
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 11:16 AM

Young but Growing, Underneath Her Apron, Close the Coalhouse Door. Aberfan was very vivid for me; I was only a couple of years older than them.

Bairns that saw the blackness slide,
Bairns that had no time to hide,
There's bairns beneath the mountainside.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Lighter
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 11:21 AM

I am fascinated by this. Without saying which, some of these songs actually make me sneer - at the blatant, formulaic manipulation by the authors.

Without saying which, others don't.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: GUEST,bankley
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 11:22 AM

"Green Onions" by Booker T and the MGs

fortunately it's an instrumental...






just kiddin' around...

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: GUEST,DonMeixner
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 11:25 AM

I can any song with out crying but I've had such a thick tjroat I couldn't continue.

The Fires of Calais by James Keelaghan
The Rocket by Fred Eaglesmith
My Old Man by Jerry Jeff Walker

To name a few.

Don

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: GUEST,John J
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 11:36 AM

Dancing at Whitsun.

JJ

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 11:48 AM

The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Bill D
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 11:59 AM

I learned "The Twa Corbies" partly to condition myself to NOT cry each time I heard it sung by Jean Redpath.

The same with hearing anyone sing "Do You Think That I Do Not Know"

Also, under special circumstances once, I found the tears flowing to "Those Were the Days" ..as I get older, just remembering that event can do it.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: SINSULL
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 12:10 PM

I Remember Loving You


I love the song but hate to hear it.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: GUEST,Roger Knowles
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 12:11 PM

'My Old Man' by Steve Goodman

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: GUEST,Elmore
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 12:20 PM

" My Old Man" by Ewan Maccoll

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: GUEST,DonMeixner
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 12:33 PM

I m fascinated by the amount of songs about the Wars we have been involved with over time.

Don

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: GUEST,JohnB
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 12:49 PM

I'm with Tim Leaning who posted above, also touched on by Kedall.
For me it's not the song, it is the moment in time and the atmoshphere.
It happens when the audience are in especially good voice and everything is going really well, then you hit a word or a phrase which just kills you on the spot. It "fortunately" often happens to me during the chorus of the songs, near the end and I can fake a bit and re-compose myself for the next verse.
Bloody Magic, JohnB.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Amos
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 12:57 PM

I wrote a song once, and believe it or not it was for my mother-in-law, whom I deeply admire.

"The secret of the living
Is always in the giving,
And the giving keeps on going
On and on...."

it goes in part . First time I sang it to BBW for tryouts I couldn't stay straightfaced, and he first time I sang it for HIL, likewise.

Another, which I can now sing comfortably but could not, was my mother's favorite, which I sang, breaking up between lines, at her funeral.

I sings, because I'm happy.
I sings, because I'm free.
For his on is on the sparrow,
And I know he thinks of me.

I can still hear herself singing it. A beautiful joyous song, but on the occasion, heartbreaking.


A

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: eddie1
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 01:04 PM

Many of the songs mentioned above "get to me" but two particularly so are "Lonely One" by Finbar Furey on the first of the "Folk Friends" albums and "Sonny's Dream". In both cases it was about a year from first hearing before I was able to sing them in public.

Eddie

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Jeri
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 01:08 PM

Bob Franke said, in a songwriting workshop I attended, writing 'from the heart' should make you cry. I know what he meant, even though I don't agree it has to every time. I go someplace when I write songs, and If I go back when I sing later, I can't get through the song. Hell, there are times I can't write because that 'place' wrecks me. There are other people's songs and traditional songs that do that too, and they're not all sad, just full of strong emotion. When I sing, I just can't get too deep into them, can't think too much.

The trick, I think, is to get into a song right up to the point of losing it, and then back off. Some times you don't back off fast enough.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 01:47 PM

I (inadvertently) started this one, saying on another thread that I'd found it hard to learn either the Bonny Hind or Sheath and Knife because I couldn't get through them for crying. It's often said that folk songs are all about death, but the deaths in those two songs are particularly vivid for some reason - I think the incommunicability of the man's grief may be what does it.

Like others, I've filled up (in the privacy of my own home) midway through Dancing at Whitsun; there's a real relentlessness to that song, the message is really hammered home. (By contrast, The Band Played... has never done it for me.) Peter Bellamy's Poor Fellows is another song I have this kind of trouble with.

The song that really sets me off, though, is Nick Drake's Place to be. After a friend died, a few years ago, I listened to Pink Moon several times in a row; even now, just thinking of that song in particular chokes me up.

When I was strong, strong in the sun
I thought I'd see you when day was done
Now I'm weaker than the palest blue
Oh so weak in this need for you

A few months later an act at Chorlton FC sprang it on me; I cried like a baby.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: GUEST,julia l
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 02:13 PM

For me it is Tommy Sands -There Were Roses
Just can't seem to be able to sing it, though I love the song.
Sometimes songs of lost sailors an fishermen will do it also, though I love to sing the Jeannie C

For years, Fred had trouble with Scarborough Settler's Lament. I once saw him lose it completely in concert. After he recorded it on our "Looking Home" album, he was more able to perform it. Still a powerful experience.

Strange how some songs push buttons you didn't realize you had

Julia L

Subject: Lyr Add: I CRIED (Ruth Pelham)
From: Barbara
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 02:27 PM

Various songs in the moment do it to me. Sang "How can I keep from Singing" at Mom's services this summer; but trying to sing Here is My Home this NYs at Harmony really wiped me out.
Here's another that often gets me.


I CRIED
by Ruth Pelham

TToday was real tough, I got out of bed,
I cuddled with my teddy bear and then laid down my head
And then I cried, cried, cried cried.

I said, "I won't wear those shoes and I won't wear those socks,
And I won't go to school if I can't bring my new rocks,
And then I cried, cried, cried cried.

Breakfast was a real scene. I would not eat my eggs,
I got jam in my hair and I spilled juice all down my legs,
And then I cried, cried, cried cried.

School was no better. My best friend was sick.
I got gum all on my homework. In gym I got kicked,
And then I cried, cried, cried cried.

Came home after school. Fresh muffins on the plate.
Daddy poured me a glass of milk and hugged me warm and tight,
And then I cried, cried, cried cried.

My dad said, "What is wrong?" and this is what I said:
"I wish that you and Mom would live together again,"
And then I cried, cried, cried cried.

"Your mom and I are good friends, no longer husband and wife,
But we will always love you, we'll love you all our lives,"
And then we cried, cried, cried cried.

Today was real tough. I got ready for bed.
I combed my hair and brushed my teeth and put the pillow over my head,
And then I cried, cried, cried cried.
(gradually slower) cried, cried, cried... cri... (soft snore).

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: DeanofRochester
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 03:01 PM

Have a Go Hero by Queensbury Rules - an amazing modern folk song that I always crack up when I try singing it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOu_fsAsCI8

Also The Island by Paul Brady

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Lighter
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 03:17 PM

What, no "Joy of Living" by MacColl?

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: GUEST,moira(flying cat)
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 04:23 PM

for me Ewan McColl's joy of living brings the tears and also the ballad Prince Heathen. The first time I heard that was when silvia barnes sang it in Susex some years ago and it gets me every time.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Joe_F
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 04:59 PM

Follow Me Home
Margery Grey

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: frogprince
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 06:02 PM

Painful Tears:
The Ballad of Penny Evans, by Steve Goodman
Touch a Name on the Wall, by Joel Mabus

"Sappy" tears:
There Goes that Rainbow Again, by Kris K.

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: GUEST,Waltzing Matilda
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 06:13 PM

The Song in question isn't the traditional song Waltzing Matilda, but Eroc Bogles amazing gallipoli war song, The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, I couldn't get through it first time I tried it. Another of his also had a similar effect,The Greenfields Of France, sometimes titled Willy McBride

Another song that got to me was Hank Williams, Mother's Day. And My fav song to perform, very old Irish Read ballad, The Spinning Wheel, oddly the lyrics are quite a cheerful song, but tune is so lilting and reminds me of my childhood in Ireland where I heard it sung first, with a harp backing, beautiful song

Subject: RE: Songs You Can't Sing for Crying
From: Edthefolkie
Date: 24 Jan 10 - 06:23 PM

I couldn't even begin to sing it, but if I did it'd be Willy O'Winsbury.

And re The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, it took June Tabor a while to sing it without tears, and she was pretty close when I saw her do it a couple of times. So were the audience.