I just recorded a bunch of songs about death. Why? Fr. John Behr, Regius Professor of Humanity at the University of Aberdeen, has often remarked on how the biggest societal change in modern times has not been the invention of electric lights, air travel, or even the internet, but the fact that our way of dealing with death has been so drastically altered—the “disappearance of death,” he calls it.

By the ‘disappearance’ of death, I do not of course mean that we no longer die, but rather the troubling eradication of the presence of the dying and the dead from our living space. Instead of death happening at home, with the dying one cared for by family and neighbors, who then tend to her or his body till she or he can be commended to God and entrusted to the earth, death has now become largely consigned to the hospital, where ‘life’ is preserved as long as possible, and when it becomes unfeasible the ‘life-support’ machine is switched off, with the family allowed a brief period of mourning with the corpse before it is handed over to the mortician, culminating in a ceremony at which the corpse is increasingly not present (having already been disposed of) but the past ‘life’ of the departed celebrated. In a very real sense, we today live as hedonists (as if this life in the body as we know it is what it is all about) and die as Platonists (the chains of the body now being removed and disposed of, so that we can, unfettered by the reality of the corpse, celebrate the past ‘life’ of the person), all of which displays a very ambiguous attitude towards our embodiment. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this is the greatest change in the history of the human race: everyone, everywhere, from time immemorial had to deal with death in an immediate, familial, manner until its industrialization over the course of the twentieth century.

The various technologies that have been developed over the last century or so have had some large, obvious effects on our society, yes; but the “disappearance of death” has had an arguably more radical, serious impact on our souls. It could be changing our humanity on a more profound level than any technology.

With this alarming insight from Fr. Behr ringing in my mind, I was on a trip with my wife to New Orleans (a city famous for its above-ground cemeteries and ostentatious funeral processions) when I heard the tune of a song that I knew but couldn’t recall the name of. After some digging, I learned that it was called St. James Infirmary, and found that it had a very interesting history—so interesting, in fact, that I couldn’t stop researching it and had to buy this fantastic book. St. James Infirmary, one of the most ubiquitous and re-recorded songs of the 20th century, I noticed shared a remarkable feature with a particular selection of others songs that I ran into tangentially while researching it: the explicit subject matter of bodily death, corpses, funerals, and graves. Some of these songs have their roots in the 18th century or earlier, some were composed well into the 20th; but they all boldly describe a time before the industrialization of human corpse disposal and the “disappearance of death.”

I decided as a special project that I would record some of these songs and offer them together as a small contribution to acknowledging our current problem and hopefully reawakening a sense of what being an embodied human used to be like. Some of these songs are overtly religious-y, others are overtly non-religious. By including a song in this project I’m not endorsing (or dismissing) any particular perspective it may have, but am only presenting them all as they’ve been passed on and preserved, aware that each one at the very least captures a facet of that older human experience, whether good or bad. Though the afterlife and what may be on the other side of the veil certainly feature in a few of these songs, what they’re really about is the earthy, fleshy reality we experience on this side of that veil. Sung by men and women, cowboys and gamblers, lovers, friends, and family members, these songs continue to persevere because they remind us that death does not disappear regardless of how well we’ve learned to neglect it.

Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie

This old cowboy ballad, a descendant of the even older “The Ocean Burial,” tells of a young man about to die while out in the wilderness of the open prairie, surrounded by his cowboy compatriots. His final thoughts are of not being buried out in the middle of nowhere but having his body brought back home to be laid to rest near family and friends. His poignant pleading reminds us that, despite being told “it matters not where the body lies,” there’s an indelible, unshakable instinct in us that something of our nature somehow remains tied to our bodies even after we die, and that where our bodies are buried and how they’re treated matters.

The Old Churchyard

Dating back at least to the 1850s, this quasi-hymn expresses a range of feelings about a local church burial ground as a place of remembrance, of mourning, of rest, of imprisonment, and finally of liberation. The evocative, almost fairy-story-like mention of “paths ‘neath the soft green sward” gives the impression that just beneath the grass is a different sort of realm, and the words “cold and hard” to describe the pillows of the dead give me an eerie feeling. The metaphysics in the song (at least in its current, popular version) could suggest the theory of “soul sleep,” as there are ample references to the sleep of the dead and the cessation of trials, but no clear reference to an un-embodied intermediate state between death and the resurrection (unless “haven of rest where no tears ever flow” implies consciously enjoying paradise). This is the only of the songs included in this project that does include the resurrection of the dead, though, and in gloriously powerful language at that. Ultimately, the song communicates that the “prisons of clay” (graves) don’t have to be feared, and can even be welcomed as places of rest, since Jesus himself has laid in and hallowed the grave and will burst them all open on the final Day.

The Unquiet Grave

This is probably the oldest of the songs I included, originating somewhere in the British Isles, possibly well before the 19th century, and collected by folklorist Francis James Child for inclusion in his massively influential “The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1892-1898.” The song is a story of inordinate mourning and the effect it may even have on the repose of the departed. A young lover, heartbroken at the loss of his “one true love,” declares that he will stay and mourn on her grave “a twelvemonth and a day.” This period having elapsed, “a voice” rises from the grave to ask who is disturbing her sleep. “The belief,” writes Carol Rumens at The Guardian, “that graves become ‘unquiet’, and the restless ghosts enact an angry or violent haunting because excessive grief prevents their leaving the earth, is an ancient one, far older than the poem.” The sorrowful lover admits that he craves one last kiss, but the ghostly voice assures him that her “earthy strong” breath would cause his own death. The depths of grief have rendered the young man unreasonable though, and with his assent to kiss the one-year-dead corpse of his beloved, the ghost replies tenderly with a parable of the natural wilting of a flower, urging him to be at peace in life until it runs its course. I chose to end my rendition with the repetition of stanza 1 sung in the voice of the young man, implying the ghost has finished speaking to him and he, perhaps begrudgingly, reaches some acceptance.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken

First written in 1907 by Ada R. Habershon, Will the Circle Be Unbroken was included in several American hymnals in the early 20th century. In 1935 The Carter Family recorded a version in which they kept the original tune and basic chorus, but substantially modified or rewrote the stanza lyrics. The Carter version, re-named Can the Circle Be Unbroken, was less hymn-like and more like a folk ballad, focusing more on the grief of loss in the stanzas instead of the general hope for heaven. “‘Can the Circle Be Unbroken’ also focuses on the death of a beloved mother rather than family members in general (as in the original hymn). In any event, it is not surprising that the more emotional Carter version won people’s hearts. Roy Acuff used the Carter lyrics when he recorded it in 1940, and that eventually became the standard version.” But even in the more mournful popular version as it now exists (going by the original name), there is still a hope, not so much for heaven itself, but for restored relationships, the mending of “the circle.” This hope is expressed as a rhetorical question, and the “better home a-waiting in the sky” is anticipated not for its pearly gates or golden streets, but as a healing of the home that had become so lonesome without the mother in stanza 4. Ever since the 1972 recording of the song by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band which had a whole host of country music legends singing along on the chorus, the tradition of using gang vocals during the chorus has endured, as it gives the impression of the “circle” being mended and extended; I wanted to keep that tradition, too.

The Streets of Laredo

This is another famous cowboy ballad, and it also (like Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie) derives from an older song. But unlike Bury Me Not, whose ancestor has a known author and publishing date, the ancestor of Streets of Laredo is a British folk ballad of unknown authorship or dating. The Unfortunate Rake (also known as The Unfortunate Lad) is a ballad with a multitude of variants and many different derivations, so many that folklorists refer to this large family of songs as the Rake Cycle (including The Sailor Cut Down in his Prime, Bad Girl’s Lament, One Morning in May, Cowboy’s Lament, and eventually The Streets of Laredo). What they all share in common is a character on the verge of death telling the story of their “disordering,” almost always because of some form of loose living. In Laredo, the narrator happens upon a “young cowboy” wrapped up in linen bandages who proceeds to tell of how he has been shot and will presently die. The young cowboy mentions frequenting “Rosie’s” (the implication is a brothel) and the card house, so presumably a life of profligacy was the proximate cause of some dispute which ended with a gunshot to his chest. He makes some requests for his burial, and just after asking for a sip of water he expires before the narrator can return with the drink. Laredo, like the other songs in the Rake Cycle, is a cautionary tale, a warning against licentiousness and immorality. The song concludes with the burial wishes of the poor cowboy being honored, “though he said he’d done wrong.”

St. James Infirmary

This is the song that first drew my attention to the tradition of singing about mortal remains. Ironically it’s one of the more lately written (or at least, compiled) in the collection. In some versions (like the one I chose to do), the song begins with its narrator in “Joe’s Barroom,” where he and the other patrons are regaled with a story from a sad figure who just recently “went down to St. James Infirmary for to see [his] baby there”. The man finds her already dead, her body laid out on a “long, white table.” It seems at first that he’s trying to keep a stiff upper lip as he tells himself, “Let her go, let her go, God bless her…”, but he continues, “…wherever she may be. She could roam this wide world over, and never find a sweeter man than me.” Both his apparent lack of concern about the location of his lover’s soul and his instinct to comfort himself with the assurance that, even in death, she’ll never meet his equal clues us in to this man’s seediness and selfishness. As he describes the funeral procession of his lost lover, there’s a clue that she may have been a prostitute as the only ones accompanying her body to the graveyard are six other young ladies. The story-teller then immediately switches to the subject of his own death, not humbly contemplating his own frailty and mortality, but announcing a string of outlandish and showy demands for his funeral, to the end that “the boys’ll know I died standin’ pat.”

It has long been assumed that this song was yet another descendent of the Rake Cycle, especially because of its funerary requests, but Robert Harwood has fairly conclusively shown that it arose primarily from a different musical sphere, namely the minstrelsy tradition in the United States. But “St. James, like many other songs with folk origins, is a cut-and-paste mashup,” joining elements from several seemingly unrelated songs to create a strange, new, and compelling song tradition of its own. The setting of “Joe’s Barroom” seems to come from an 1872 poem called The Face Upon the Barroom Floor. The line “Let her go. . . she’ll never find a sweeter man than me” seems to come straight from an old song about a jilted suitor, published in a Harvard song book in 1909. The tune itself, remarkably, may have immigrated to the U.S. in the 19th century with Norwegian gypsies fleeing persecution (listen for yourself). But how all of these elements were joined together is anyone’s guess. The earliest published form of the song comes in 1925 as Gambler’s Blues by Phil Baxter, and the earliest recording of this version came in 1927 by Fess Williams. In 1929 it was copyrighted by publishing mogul Irving Mills (a.k.a. “Joe Primrose”), and it was made internationally famous by jazz greats Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway. With its mysterious origins, its adaptability, and its haunting tune and subject matter, the song has clearly proven that it has staying power.

Concluding Thoughts

Recording these songs was fun (though be it noted: I’m a total amateur with no professional equipment and was totally operating with the conviction that “perfect is the enemy of the good”), but just learning the songs and learning about them is what I got the most out of from this little project. Their themes and language are understandably jarring to us, especially the more sanitized our experience with dying and death becomes. And while Halloween decorations and horror movies keep bodily death from disappearing from the public consciousness entirely, they train us to associate it almost entirely with entertainment, leaving us emotionally and spiritually unprepared for the real range of thoughts and emotions that ought to (and historically did) accompany the experience of sitting with the dead bodies of our loved ones and preparing them—and ourselves—for their interment in the cold clay of this earth. There’s obviously much more I could say regarding the state(s) of a soul after death (from various folk and Christian traditions), and I have elsewhere on this blog; but that’s not the focus of these songs or of this project. This is meant to help us think about how we encounter and handle death while we’re still on this side of the grave. I hope it accomplishes that.