Send to a Friend

Berserker's avatar

I'm looking for creepy folksongs with disturbing meanings. Got any?

Asked by Berserker (33548points) November 16th, 2010

Today I was thinking about stuff like prayers and nursery rhymes…like that ’‘Ring Around The Rosie’’ thing, it apparently has something to do with the Bubonic Plague, and there’s also that creepy prayer…if I should die before I wake, pray the Lord my soul to take…seriously what the ass? That’s some creepy shit to recite before going to bed, especially when you’re seven.
Then it reminded me of some Québec folk songs I discovered that, after listening to them for a bit, discovered some very…dark meaning to them.
(Warning, all my examples are in French.)
For example, this one, for as pretty and peaceful as it sounds, is actually about some prince who slaughtered a duck with his silver riffle, and the singer expressing his or her grief about the death of said water fowl. Apparently it’s over three hundred years old, so the lyrics probably vary, but now it’s a children’s song…:/ It has its cheery moment at the end, how the duck’s remains don’t go to waste, but I still find it sad.

There’s also this one which intrigues me greatly. It speaks of a female horse and her baby, eating all the food in the field. A little like the cicada and the ant story, this horse will repent her actions when winter comes, when the fox, the wolf and the badger come to devour her and her starving child. (The chorus details those three animals dancing and singing for joy as they await for the horses to become frail and weak, although I thought that badgers weren’t active in the Winter, but eh.)

So, it’s not anything actually…brutally morbid like The Hearse Song (Which I have no idea if it stems from an actual folk song or not, but it still rules.) but I’m looking for depressing and slightly creepy folk songs, no matter how they sound.

The songs I presented aren’t terribly ’‘scary’’ as they are rather very sad and depressing in meaning. I admit, I may have misread the meanings, but I’m pretty sure I got the right idea. That’s what I’m looking for from you guys, if yall got somehting. I hope my descriptions were good enough to give you a decent idea of the folksongs I’m looking for. I’m sorry I didn’t give English ones, but none sprang to mind at this point…wait! Something like this !
(In short, about a woman who slept with a man, and he wanted to marry her, but she refused and the man left, but when she got preggers, wrote a letter to the man to tell him to come back, and he refused. The song is quite the poet compared to my briefing though lol.)
These lyrics here are different from what I first heard, which was a folksong remade by The Irish Descendants but still, if you have any kind of cool, sad and depressing folksongs for me, that would rule. And they can be in whatever language you want.

EDIT The tag feature doesn’t seem to want to let me add that I wished, so eh.

Using Fluther

or

Using Email

Separate multiple emails with commas.
We’ll only use these emails for this message.