The Shady Side of the Street

"In a world that's so troubled and so insecure," says a vice president of a music publishing firm trying to make it sound psychologically profound, "teenagers find that the only thing that's eternal and everlasting is love after death." Since that's what the young are supposed to want, that's what they are getting. The more violent the death, the more violent the passion pouring from the nation's jukeboxes. Keens one kid on Teen Angel, an M-G-M release:

Teen angel, can you hear me? Teen angel, can you see me? Are you somewhere up above, And am I still your own true love?

Teen angel, it develops, went to heaven when she left the side of her steady date, ran back to his stalled car to retrieve his high-school ring, and was flattened by a train. Another current song records the fate of a red Indian named Running Bear (Mercury) who leaps into angry rapids to swim to his Little White Dove. She dives in, too, from the opposite bank of the river, and they drown happily into the hereafter. But nothing in the 1960 morbid-ditty collection can touch Tell Laura I Love Her (RCA Victor), a best-selling ballad set in the flaming wreckage of a stock car. Tommy, the dying driver, has entered the race to win money to buy a wedding ring; he gasps out the hit tune with his dying breath and departs for heaven.

Funereal Chimes. Trapped in soda fountains or chrome-aluminum roadside diners and forced to listen to such uplift, elders may blink in dismay. Pop songs are now, more than ever before, tailored to the adolescents who buy them. But the gloom boom is not new.

There was, for example, The Lady in Crepe, a woman whose husband, according to the ballad popular in the 18905. had drowned in Long Island Sound. The mourning widow subsequently went fishing there.

Her line grew heavy as lead, When up rose a creature whose every feature Resembled her husband dead. "Come hither to me in the deep blue sea." And he gave such a tug on the line That he dragged her down in her seagreen gown. While she sang "Forever Thine."

Even more touching was the situation of the poor man in In the Baggage Coach Ahead (1896), who sat in a train trying to hush his crying baby. The child's face reminded him of his late wife, making the trip in a coffin elsewhere on the train.

Telephones had barely become popular before a little girl was on the line, in a popular song, singing: "Hello, Central, give me Heaven." She wanted to talk to her mother. And never did the eternal triangle chime more funereally than it did in the Nineties, most notably under the hand of Paul Dresser, songwriter (The Banks of the Wabash), monologuist, medicine-wagon minstrel and older brother of Theodore Dreiser. Dresser's He Brought Home Another might have qualified as the first great aria in soap opera.

While they were honeymooning, In the mansion on the hill, Kind hands were laying Nellie To rest, behind the mill.

In the 30s, came Gloomy Sunday. "In death I'm caressing you," mourned a lonely lover, "with the last breath of my soul I'll be blessing you." Song pluggers boasted that the ditty gave a big boost to suicide rates all over the world, particularly along the blue Danube, where students were said to have jumped in in droves.

Locomotive Chorus. When country singing came out of the hills, its highly developed morbid strain came too, and the form soon adapted itself to new material: guitarists began twanging out such up-to-date items as Old Man Atom with a locomotive chorus ("Hir-o-shi-ma, Na-ga-sa-ki"). When little Kathy Fiscus died at the bottom of a California well in 1949, the Ballad of Kathy Fiscus was probably inevitable, like the more recent Ballad of Caryl Chessman and today's Ballad of Francis Powers.

Out of such a tradition and its emotions, transferred to the Lolita generation, it was also predictable that 1960-5 Tell Laura I Love Her, a collector's item among bad records, would bring a response from Laura. It has come--with the just-released Tell Tommy I Miss Him, whose sales are already climbing toward 50,000 records. Laura lugubriously moans:

He wanted so much to make me his wife ; Now our love lives on though he lost his life.

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