Quoting joanna <123hop at comcast.net>:
> Gloomy Sunday IS silly/depressing, but it's also a beautiful song.
>
>> Billie also has the actually great very depressing,
>> still-horrifying anti-lynching song she coauthored,
>> Strange Fruit.
>>
> If memory serves, the guy who collaborated on "Strange Fruit" was a commie
> who wound up adopting the Rosenberg children.
Abel Meerpool wrote BOTH the words and the music to Strange Fruit and Billie Holliday appreciated the song and was the first to record it (she was neither a co-writer or collaborator). To further nitpick, Tim Reynolds included "Strange Fruit" at #7 in his excellenct and hilarious article that started this thread.
There are obviously lots of sad songs and many vary in their notoriety.
I think Mr. Reynolds may have included the Byrds (Pete Seeger tortured this poem as well) musicalization of the Nazim Hikmet poem "I Come and Stand at Every Door."
For my money, post-punk Jackie Leven pens the most depressing songs (and he has A LOT of them). "Desolation Blues" is probably the most inwardly depressing. "Heroin Dealer Blues", "Sexual Loneliness of Jesus Christ", "Deep Choking Wooded Death Fix", "Unviersal Blue", "Poortoun", "Marble City Bar" and on and on . . . but yet highly recommended!
Jim
"My hair was scorched by swirling flame My eyes grew dim, my eyes grew blind Death came and turned my bones to dust And that was scattered by the wind."
--Nazim Hikmet
"If he were alive He couldn't help me today Because when your heart is dead You get the desolation blues."
--Jackie Leven