Has a Song Ever Made You Cry?

Another day is at end
Mama says she's tired again
No one can even begin to tell her

I hardly know what to say
But maybe it's better that way
If Papa were here I'm sure he'd tell her

Shannon is gone I hope she's drifting out to sea
She always loved to swim away
Maybe she'll find an island with a shady tree
Just like the one in our backyard

Mama tries hard to pretend things will get
Better again
Somehow she's keeping it all inside her

But finally the tears fill our eyes
And I know that somewhere tonight
She knows how much we really miss her

Shannon is gone I hope she's drifting out to sea
She always loved to swim away
Maybe she'll find an island with a shady tree
Just like the one in our backyard

Many songs make me cry and some are quite unusual. These two, for example.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa-eKpPsvYU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfm-17pu6SQ&feature=related

Anything by Billie Holiday.

"Crying" by Roy Orbison

Many of Smokey Robinson's songs

Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.

Caruso by Pavarotti

And of course, The Star Spangled Banner. I had tears when Aretha sang it at the inaugural ceremony.

Siegfried's Funeral March from "Der Gotterdamerung" by Wagner- That's the "tune" that turned me on to classical music. Heard it live, and was practically hysterical.

Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony- Also heard live.

The Three Bells- Found the words very poignant.

"Teen Angel" - That was a long time ago, and so sad.

Oh yeah, that's a real tear jerker if ever there was one.

There's just too many songs to list that make me cry

some are;
one this harvest moon
puff the magic dragon
tracy chapman - baby will you hold me tonight
something by sting that starts with "billie was born within sight of a shipyard" just can't think of the name this moment.

Island of souls


Billy was born within sight of the shipyard
First son of a riveter's son
And Billy was raised as the ship grew a shadow
Her great hull would blot out the light of the sun

And six days a week he would watch his poor father
A working man live like a slave
He'd drink every night and he'd dream of a ***ure,
Of money he never would save
And Billy would cry when he thought of the ***ure

Soon came a day when the bottle was broken
They launched the great ship out to sea
He felt he'd been left on a desolate shore
To a ***ure he desperately wanted to flee
What else was there for a shipbuilder's son
A new ship to be built, new work to be done

One day he dreamed of the ship in the world
It would carry his father and he
To a place they would never be found
To a place far away from this town.

Trapped in the cage of the skeleton ship
All the workmen suspended like flies
Caught in the flare of acetylene light
A working man works till the industry dies
And Billy would cry when he thought if the ***ure

Then what they call an industrial accident
Crushed those it couldn't forgive
They brought Billy's father back home in an ambulance
A brass watch, a cheque, maybe three weeks to live,
And what else was there for a riveter's son
A new ship to be built, new work to be done

That night, he dreamed of the ship in the world
It would carry his father and he
To a place they could never be found
To a place far away from this town,
A Newcastle ship without coals
They would sail to the island of souls.

Yeah, that's it.

The song "wild, wild sea" is a followup song to that one, at least it seems so to me. doesn't make me cry, but if you listen to the island of souls, then wild, wild sea, it's a continuation of the same story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJLAix9B-L4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZb4AnCQ1f0

both are beautiful

Sting
The Wild Wild Sea

I saw it again this evening,
Black sail in a pale yellow sky
And just as before in a moment,
It was gone where the grey gulls fly

If it should happen again I shall worry
That only a strange ship could fly
And my sanity scans the horizon
In the light of a darkening sky

That night as I walked in my slumber
I walked into the sea strand
And I swam with the moon and her lover
Until I lost sight of the land

I swam till the night became morning
Black sea in the reddening sky
Found myself on the deck on a rolling ship
So far where no grey gulls fly

All around me was silence
As if mocking my frail human hopes
And a question mark hung in the canvas
For the wind that had died in the ropes

I may have slept for an hour
I may have slept for a day
For a woke in a bed of white linen
And the sky was the colour of clay

At first just a rustle of canvas
And the gentlest breath on my face
But a galloping line of white horses
Said that soon we were in for a race

The gentle sigh turned to a howling
And the grey sky she angered to black
And my anxious eyes searched the horizon
With the gathering sea at my back

Did I see the shade of a sailor
On the bridge through the wheelhouse pane
Held fast to the wheel of the rocking ship
As I squinted my eyes in the rain

For the ship had turned into the wind
Against the storm to brace
And underneath the sailor's hat
I saw my father's face

If a prayer today is spoken
Please offer it for me
When the bridge to heaven is broken
And you've lost on the wild wild sea
Lost on the wild wild sea...

Sting's epitaph: Stung

The tears come very easily to me when hearing music from most genres.

Songs by Dylan, especially, "Born at the Right Time," most of Leonard Cohen's songs/poems, jazz--Miles Davis' In a Silent Way-- and great classical music.

I think that, when we hear something so close to perfection, it becomes overwhelming, something our human minds can't listen to without falling apart. It sometimes makes me wonder if the composers cried while the music moved from mind to paper.

This used to always make me cry because my brother died in New Jersey in June, 1990 and I was living in North Carolina - so I got the call and I had to pack and drive ten hours, basically through the night, with my son who was a small baby at the time, and this song kept playing over and over- I think it must have been number one or something.
And you know how when a death is unexpected your first reaction is disbelief?
I couldn't believe my brother was dead and I wouldn't see him again, so the words of this song, 'Hold on for one more day,' just resonated and I really believed as I was driving that I'd get there and he wouldn't really be dead-it would all be a big mistake- or even that I would be able to do something to change it.

So for years I'd just tear up when I'd hear this song and would have to change the station on the radio if it came on - but now I can listen to it without crying.
And I like this video of it - these girls make me laugh:

This song just killed me the first time I heard it.


I can't help it, every time I hear this song I well up. It was the song I walked down the aisle to and I want it played at my funeral.

I think many of you are familiar with Eric Bogle's And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda ? (If I was on the ball I would have mastered the downloading music to A2K-thing by now. Sorry.)

Anyway, I was running a unit of study about war, with some middle school students. We'd just read Johnny Got His Gun, which was pretty devastating. Then we listened to Matilda. It was so gut wrenching, as we sat & listened in silence, I cried in front of the whole class. Impossible not to. But then, some of the students were doing the same, so ...

That one gutted me too the first time I heard the Pogue's play it.


The tags are [youtube] put the url here [/youtube]

Thank you, Ceili! That was quite an experience. I hadn't heard the Pogues' version before (& had to get out my hanky again! ) It's more of a marching dirge than the Eric Bogle version I'm familiar with. Very moving. And I loved Ataturk's amazing generous & compassionate quote (considering Australians were the invaders at Gallipoli) at the end of the video:

Thanks to Ceili for helping me to learn about Ennio Morricone, the composer of the Music for the film "The Mission". I enjoyed this film a great deal. I was familiar with the historical events surrounding it, including the roles of the Jesuit missionaries among the Guarani people of what is now Paraguay, and the terrible war that followed between them and the, mostly Portuguese, bandieros who exploited them. The story was well told in the film and the musical score left a lasting impression with me as evidently it also did on Ceili.

To my delight I quickly discovered (on You Tube) that Morricone was also the composer of the musical scores of other films of about twenty years ago that also left similar lasting impressions - all involving bittersweet remembrances of things past. The films were "Cinema Paradiso" and "Once upon a time in America" Here are links to the music from them;
"Cinema Paradiso"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW_-0H_u3RQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwDf2DCX_1A&feature=related
and "Once upon a Time in America"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzaF5jrcDIE&feature=related

The Portuguese & Brazilians have a great word for the emotions these films and the music evokes - "saudades", bittersweet recollections of things past, but fondly remembered.

On a different note here is a bit of schmaltz that I have always loved. It is the Romance from the score of a 1930s film from Russia composed by Shostakovich
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si1NEHYCUBU&feature=related

I watched a really interesting documentary on him a few weeks ago. I don't think the spaghetti western would be the genre is was without his music. The soundtrack of Clint Eastwood's life would be bereft with out the great Morricone. He's written more music than most of us realize and I think he was robbed of the Oscar he deserved for the Mission. I'm glad you like him too.

I'm not a Christian in the traditional sense of the word. I wasn't familiar with "Mary Did You Know" until two years ago when I heard it at a Christmas service. It was performed by a woman who sang it with such passion that there wasn't a dry eye in the house. She accompanied herself on piano. Here's a more orchestrated version. It's become my favorite Christmas song.

Oh -- and I sobbed like a baby through the entire first act of Les Mis.

another tear inducing bogle song

It certainly is, djjd!

<honk>



Lovely version. Thank you.

But I think Eric's is still my favourite version. Something about his gruff, no frills, rough around the edges delivery is perfect for this song.:


NO MAN'S LAND (THE GREEN FIELDS OF FRANCE)

Well how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside
And rest for a while 'neath the warm summer sun
I've been working all day and I'm nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the dead heroes of nineteen-sixteen.
I hope you died well and I hope you died clean
Or Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene.

Chorus :
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly,
Did they sound the dead-march as they lowered you down.
Did the bugles play the Last Post and chorus,
Did the pipes play the 'Flooers o' the Forest'.

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined
Although you died back there in nineteen-sixteen
In that faithful heart are you ever nineteen
Or are you a stranger without even a name
Enclosed and forgotten behind the glass frame
In a old photograph, torn and battered and stained
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame.

The sun now it shines on the green fields of France
The warm summer breeze makes the red poppies dance
And look how the sun shines from under the clouds
There's no gas, no barbed wire, there's no guns firing now
But here in this graveyard it's still no-man's-land
The countless white crosses stand mute in the sand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man
To a whole generation that were butchered and damned.

Now young Willie McBride I can't help but wonder why
Do all those who lie here know why they died
And did they believe when they answered the cause
Did they really believe that this war would end wars
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying was all done in vain
For young Willie McBride it all happened again
And again, and again, and again, and again.

`