This song is horrifyingly real beyond the extent of most songs you will ever hear.
It’s from the People’s Temple Choir. The People’s Temple was a church started by Jim Jones.
Jim Jones was fanatical, but at least at first, promised to and was to a certain extent, helping the community. He was a powerful speaker that grew a following. Eventually, the church degraded into a cult and Jim Jones became out of control with power. He eventually created Jonestown, a place where “his people” could seek refuge from the world that had gone wrong (as he presented it to them).
What’s particularly sad about this song, is that it’s full of hope. What all the people wanted was this ideal freedom from the cruelty, racism, and poverty of the world, which were very real and still are real problems with our world today. This proved to be a very easy tool for manipulation by Jim Jones to promise a world without these things. There is no such thing as utopia. This was also Hitler’s goal. We hopefully have learned our lesson, that the seeking of perfection and world peace are in fact, very dangerous ideas.
As things inevitably fell apart, Jones had large barrels of punch with cyanide prepared and commanded that everyone must drink, that it was the only way out. People began drinking the punch and forcing their children and babies to drink as well. Those that refused were made to drink at gunpoint. Some tried to run and were shot and only a handful of people managed to escape. Ultimately, 909 Temple member’s lives were ended that day in the most disturbingly pointless mass suicide on record.
“To the extent the actions in Jonestown were viewed as a mass murder, it is the largest such event in modern history and resulted in the largest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the events of September 11, 2001.“
— http🦇/wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown
The part most disturbing is now going back and listening to the lyrics:
“…Mommy and Daddy, will protect you… and keep you safe from all harm…“
It gives me goosebumps and sends shivers down my spine knowing full-well that they killed their children, their babies, all of them.
If you’re interested in learning more about these events I recommend this documentary, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple.
Listen to it again and find other selections of sad music I’ve collected here:
I have so much more music, so this isn’t quite that extensive of all the sad music I could compile. Just a glimpse.
I would love for everyone to share their own findings and songs that are personally sad to them.
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5 Comments
Black, if you’re a lover of sad music I really, truly can’t urge you enough to listen to the music of a young composer named “Stray Ghost” (real name Anthony Saggers)…
Try “Radnoti I & II” from “October Songs”
https🦇/strayghost1.bandcamp.com/album/october-songs – I like it.
Ok, this is a song by Oscar Brown, called “Brown Baby”, that was suposedly sang by Marceline when she and Jim adopted a black baby. But the song is previous to all the events of the People’s Temple.
I think people consider sad songs influenced by their lyrics, instrumentation and tone of the singer, but not music on itself in the simplest sense. Sad songs by any means: Mahler’s Kindertoten-lieder. It would still be sad even in a mambo rhythm.
For me it’s about context. So in this case this specific recording is what hits home, the fact that the song pre-dates the events of Jonestown means absolutely nothing. The original lyric’s meaning or intention does not somehow take away the impact of the feelings that this song creates in this context with these people.
Also, I would strongly disagree with the idea that beautiful and sad music will illicit the same feeling however, wherever played. I have favorite sad songs that have been covered in a hundred different ways in a dozen different genres and some sound so cheesy without passion that I have that sense of “this is off” and reach for the skip button.
I have no interest in the technicality of music, who wrote it, who sang it etc. It only matters how specific performances of music and the passion of those musicians sit with me. I think music is deeply deeply personal and never objective. Even the most simple of songs, even when instruments are out of tune or the singer is out of key, if there’s passion and emotion there it’s a different beast altogether.
Interesting answer, thanks!
Actually, I didn’t mean that this song, in this interpretation, isn’t sad, it is very sad!, but in the end you agreed with my description, and I just wanted, first, to give credit to the composer of this song and, second, to say that there are works intrinsically sad.
Now, you mentioned objectivity/subjectivity in music, and I agree with you about all the effects of subjectivity in music, but I don’t think objectivity undermines subjectivity, not at all: you say about context and how it matters for what it makes this song so sad to you, but *musical* context also makes us perceive beautiful things to which we were deaf at first.