I cannot, in all conscience, leave Louise at Sentiment Farewells lying around as a footnote in a yesterday’s blog. The four playlists she has put together, music for the soul, she calls them, constitute a brilliant resource for the bereaved and also for funeral celebrants.
Do go over to her blog and see what she’s put together. Here playlists are eclectic; there’s lots here for everybody.
And in case you missed it, here’s Simon Smith’s playlist: click!
This was played at the end of the funeral of Carl ‘Fat Boy’ Williams last Friday. I’ve not heard it used at a funeral before, but isn’t it rather good? Celebrants out there, you might like to add this to the songs you recommend to your clients. Just don’t necessarily tell em about Carl — unless it’ll help to sell it.
Somewhere, Louise at Sentiment is posting fab playlists for funerals but I can’t find where she’s doing it. Give us the link, will you, Louise? Thanks, pet.
It’s got to be a baby boomer thing, has it, this new wave of funeral directors whose most distinguishing characteristic is that they are nothing like (old school) funeral directors? Not necessarily. I can think of some who have not come fresh to funeral directing in middle age. This is not exclusively a counter-culture thing. These new funeral directors are radical, for sure, but not in an angry or iconoclastic way. They have not spurned funerary traditions, they have simply left them standing. They are thoughtful and intelligent. And for those people who do not want a full-on religious funeral, they join up the care of the body of the person who’s died to the creation of their farewell ceremony; they can do both. There is immense value in that – especially to baby boomers, who have reinvented more or less everything they have encountered throughout their lives, and now, with their parents and not a few of them standing on the brink of eternity, are beginning to give to death culture the sort of makeover they once gave to youth culture.
Two such new-wave funeral directors are Simon Smith and Jane Morrell of green fuse contemporary funerals. They have a funeral shop in Totnes where people drop in and chat about funerals. I’m always interested to know what these two are thinking. So when I heard that Simon had been given an hour slot on the Carl Muson Show on Exeter’s Phonic FM I just had to find out what he’d said. By dint of employing those devious and menacing investigative ploys which have made the Good Funeral Guide the impressively terrifying consumer resource it has become, I managed to obtain a CD of the show by the underhand expedient of asking Simon nicely to send me a copy, which, because he’s the most agreeable of fellows, he was kind enough to do.
The show centres on Simon’s playlist of what he reckons to be really good songs to play at a funeral – “the ones I want to introduce others to, not the most popular.” The songs are interspersed by chat.
The chat covers all manner of thought-provoking areas. The absence of rules around funerals – the fact that there are hardly any (so long as you do not outrage public decency). The importance of families participating “to the extent that they can … we see ourselves as permission givers.” The suggestibility of the newly bereaved, and the importance of “offering them choices, not channelling them.” The way that a death alters status within a family, a community, a workplace. The way it alters titles, too – a daughter becomes an orphan, a husband a widower.
Reflecting on his work as a celebrant, Simon says, “We don’t quite meet a lot of very interesting and fascinating people.” It reminded me of something Garrison Keillor once said: “They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I’m going to miss mine by just a few days.”
Considering the number of people who are not signed up to a faith group, whether religious or atheistic, Simon reckons that two-thirds of the population is currently not being catered for.
He talks about the denialist effect of two world wars on attitudes to death (everyone had had enough of it) and attitudes to dead bodies (ditto). He talks about the importance of death being “part of life, not tidied away,” and the value of spending time with someone who’s died: “The funeral doesn’t pass in such a blur if people have spent time with the body.”
He concludes with a wonderful quote: “We’re always standing on the edge of loss trying to retrieve human meaning from something that’s precious that has gone.”
Here is Simon’s playlist. Open Spotify now and type in the following:
You’ve Got A Friend – James Taylor
Spirit In The Sky – Norman Greenbaum
Amazing Grace – Elvis Presley (“People start swaying to that.”)
You’re The First, The Last, My Everything – Barry White
My Sweet Lord – George Harrison
Samba Pa Ti – Santana
At the grave, at the grave, at the family, family grave,
The putting of the people in the ground.
There are days, days when I shake my shovel at the sky.
Oh there are days, there are days it gets you down, down, down;
Shovel at the sky . . . gets you down.
I see many different fashions of mourning, both fancy and plain.
There are those who go very white and stand there aghast and just gawp;
They cannot manage to cry – and there’s others who cannot refrain:
Willy-nilly they bellow and howl at the drop of a corpse.
They sit in the chapel and whisper and meditate over the stiff.
They never speak ill of him – especially if he was close –
But: “What a good family man, and a wonderful friend,” even if
He was a palpable pain in the arse and he died of a dose!
At the grave, at the grave, at the family, family grave,
The putting of the people in the ground.
Some with no one there – at least, just a policeman and a priest.
There are days, oh there are days it gets you down, down, down;
Policeman and a priest . . . gets you down.
Then there are those of course who turn up and can then hardly wait
For the vicar to stop and the coffin to drop and the sobbing subside.
And then they are barely a blur as they sprint for the cemetery gates
To go get their hands on the money, the food, or the widow’s backside.
There are one or two “do”s turn out disappointingly in the extreme,
Where the booze is rough and the grub is duff and no flowers at all,
And the mother embarrasses you with a sudden hysterical scream,
Where the coffin you came to see off is pathetically small.
At the grave, at the grave, at the family, family grave,
The putting of the people in the ground.
In a whisper often I say “Good luck, my friend. Goodbye”
There are days, oh there are days it gets you down, down, down.
“Good luck, my friend. Goodbye.” It gets you down.
They do the round of the family faces and pay their respects
“We’ll have to be going.” “How nice.” “How sad.” And “Thanking you.”
They are studying form and weighing up who it is going to be next
To go under the slab. Whose turn to pay for the very next “do”.
I am a grave-digger, a digger of graves. I know my clay.
I know in my water, I know in my blood, I know in my bones
That you will never believe in the things I am going to say
Till you are listening in to a funeral all of your own.
At the grave, at the grave, at the family, family grave,
The putting of the people in the ground.
There are days, days when I shake my shovel at the sky.
Oh there are days, oh there are days it gets you down, down, down;
Shovel at the sky . . . gets you down.
I am indebted to Pat McNally for this. And while I might have added it to my post about My Way, I feel it’s too good to bury.
Over in the Philippines, it seems, karaoke is a popular pastime. According to the New York Times, after a hard day’s work, there’s nothing a weary person likes more than to find a bar, glug a beer and belt out a classic or two.
This is not a matter of audience indifference. You’ve got to be good or you get stabbed: In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads.
One song is strictly off limits everywhere. Simply too dangerous. My Way. The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling My Way in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”
Why?
Butch Albarracin, the owner of Center for Pop, a Manila-based singing school that has propelled the careers of many famous singers, was partial to what he called the “existential explanation.”
“‘I did it my way’ — it’s so arrogant,” Mr. Albarracin said. “The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights.”
The song never leads to carnage at polite British funeral. But I wonder if it leaves a subliminal bad taste in the mouth?
Read the entire New York Times piece here.
There was a little light larking at the Dead Interesting blog last week as we debated best funeral songs for atheists. Off the tops of our heads we came up with You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere – Bob Dylan, No God – Darkest Hour, Heaven is a Place on Earth – Belinda Carlisle, and, from Rupert, a variation on the famous Bob Marley song: No Jesus, No Cry. Perhaps you can think of others?
Then I found this string over at Fluther in response to: What would be an inappropriate song to play at a funeral? Most of them are a little weak, but I have to declare a weakness for We’ve Only Just Begun – Carpenters, Stayin’ Alive – Bee Gees, and Who Wants To Live Forever? – Queen. Bitches Ain’t Shit by Dr Dre sounds a contemporaneously anarchic note much favoured at Brit funerals. But for me the clear winner is: Anything by ABBA. I don’t know that it’s possible to get inappropriater than that. Made me chuckle for the rest of the day. Oh, except that, now I think of it, Take A Chance On Me has got to be a pretty good way to go for an agnostic:
But. Seriously. Worst funeral song. It’s got to be My Way, surely? It’s clear in its renunciation of any divinity (otherwise you’d have done it God’s Way). Nothing wrong with that: it’s a defensible existential stance. But what about the message to spouse/partner, family, friends, work colleagues, neighbours – indeed, every else in the entire world? It’s perfectly clear. I didn’t need you. You meant nothing to me. I did it without you. Yes, and in case you were wondering, I was self-created, too.
Could there be a more self-regarding, more narcissistic funeral song than this?
I hate it. Got anything worse?
From their press release:
Singers for Funerals is the brainchild of two professional opera singers, mezzo soprano Kirsty Young and soprano Toni Nunn. Both have performer with professional opera companies across the UK and beyond, including Kirsty’s own company, Hatstand Opera. Between them, the two ladies have sung in over 600 venues in the UK, from cathedrals to tiny parish churches, theatres to town halls, mansions to marquees.
Kirsty Young is keen to bring all that performing experience to provide quality singing for funerals:
“After singing at various funerals over the years, we realised how music could be a great comfort to family members at a difficult time, by celebrating what their loved one enjoyed in life. It is often very difficult for churches to provide a choir to sing at funerals or cremations. Many families therefore had no choice but to use recorded music, where they might have preferred a real ‘live’ singer. We give families back that option for live music, sung by an experienced professional, at an affordable price.”
I like them. Check out their website and their voices here.
Simon Smith of green fuse contemporary funerals had a piece published in October’s Funeral Service Journal, the undertakers’ trade journal, which, I feared, had something of a flower of the desert about it. Despite the best efforts of its excellent editor, Brian Parsons, funeral directors are not great readers, nor are they great writers.
Do the waning of days and the coming of autumn make you come over elegiac? It probably depends on the length and sunniness of the summer. If it was brief and wet, that first nip in the air leaves you feeling cheated. But if the summer was long and glorious, the coming of autumn feels reasonable and seasonable. There’s a sense of relief, even.
Just how we feel about human lives, the short and the long, the happy and the sad.
Over in Bethany Beach, Delaware, they have a funeral on Labor Day to mark the end of summer—a jazz funeral. The expired summer, represented by a mannequin in a casket, is carried in procession to the town’s bandstand for a concert. Says the event’s founder, Paul Jankovic, “The most important thing is you’re guaranteed to have a wonderful time. Instead of standing on the sidelines watching a parade, (those in attendance) fall in behind us as we walk down the boardwalk, just like the jazz funerals they have in New Orleans.”
Read the full story here.
This is not unusual these days: you see someone entranced by a song and when it’s done they say fervently, “I want that played at my funeral.” You’ve done it, too?
When you’ve done it once it becomes a habit. Sometimes a new song displaces an old one. Sometimes you want it played as well.
The list can easily get too long. At too many funerals these days we all have to sit through too many. There’s no point in doing at a funeral what you can just as easily do at home.
Three’s probably enough.
For the last year or so I’ve been rooting for Arlo Guthrie’s Motorcycle Song. Don’t know why. Don’t ask. Funeral planning is never enriched by the application of reason.
Arlo’s out of the window, now. I’ve found Four Strong Winds. This is definitely the one. This version. It’s the loveliest thing I have ever heard or ever will. You too, perhaps.
(Write down all your favourite songs. They can be printed on your service sheet. Your friends can go home, create a playlist in Spotify, fill a big glass and think about you.)
