Blast From The Past - Gloomy Sunday

Is it Old Shep? Something by The Smiths? Hell, no! Bill DeMain knows it's Gloomy Sunday.

REMEMBER THE OLD Monty Python sketch about "the funniest joke in the world?" Anyone who heard it died laughing. Change the joke to a song and you've got "Gloomy Sunday." Written in 1933 by Reszo Seress (pictured) and Laszlo Javor, this beautifully spooky dirge - nicknamed "the Hungarian suicide song" - killed not with fatal hilarity but a funereal sadness that seeped into the souls of hundreds of susceptible listeners. Like the teenage girl in Vienna who drowned herself while clutching the sheet music of the song. Or the Budapest shopkeeper who hanged himself and left a note that quoted from the lyrics. Or the London woman who overdosed while listening repeatedly to a recording of the song.

Of course, this might all be urban legend. One thing's for sure, though. "Gloomy Sunday"'s composer took his life. But that was later. In 1933, Seress was a struggling songwriter living in Paris. The story goes that after his fiancée dumped him, he went to the piano and out flowed this minor-key ribbon of blue smoke. Seress's friend Laszlo Javor penned an even bleaker lyric for it.

Despite recordings by Paul Robeson and French singer Damia, the ballad initially flopped. That changed three years later, when it was connected to a rash of suicides in Hungary, and was allegedly banned. Short of learning Hungarian and thumbing through Budapest newspapers from the ‘30s, it's impossible to verify this (Hungary does historically have one of the highest suicide rates in the world - approximately 46 in every 100,000 people take their own lives). But it certainly makes for a good story. And it did at the time too, because American music publishers came calling.

Tin Pan Alley tunesmith Sam M. Lewis - best known for chirpy hits like "Dinah" and "Five Foot Two, Eyes Of Blue" - banged out a translation. Sample verse:

"Soon there'll be candles and prayers that are sad, I know

Let them not weep, let them know that I'm glad to go

Death is no dream, for in death I'm caressing you

With the last breath of my soul I'll be blessing you"

Take that, Marilyn Manson.

Lewis made one concession to commerciality, tacking on a coda that lessened the song's necrophiliac tone: "Dreaming, I was only dreaming / I wake and I find you asleep in the deep of my heart, dear." Yet its tragedy value only increased - especially in 1941 when Billie Holiday recorded the definitive version - and in the early ‘40s, the BBC deemed the song "too upsetting" for the public, then later said that only instrumental versions were suitable for airplay. But when one too many suicides were linked to the song, they imposed a ban which is still in effect to this day.

The song has since been covered by Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles, Björk and others. And Reszo Seress? When "Gloomy Sunday" hit, he attempted to reconcile with the ex who inspired it. Shortly after, he heard that she had poisoned herself, and - you guessed it - there was a copy of the sheet music of the song nearby.

In 1968, Seress leaped to his death from a building. He left no note behind, though the New York Times was quick to suppose that he'd been depressed at never having another hit as big as his deathly signature song.

Bill DeMain

Here is Billie Holiday again for your "pleasure"

10 Gloomy Sunday

Billie Holiday