Songs from the Dead: Short Histories of Legendary Songs

Boléro begins with almost nothing: a snare drum, a few plucked strings, and a flute playing a tune that will come back again and again.Ravel wrote it in 1928 after a copyright problem forced him to abandon a planned orchestration of Albéniz. His replacement idea was almost perversely simple. Keep the tempo steady. Keep repeating two melodies. Change the instruments. Get louder.This episode follows what happened to that idea after Ravel. Roy Orbison turned the relentless build into Running Scared. Jeff Beck, Grace Slick and Emerson, Lake & Palmer found different ways to use the bolero pulse. Nintendo nearly opened The Legend of Zelda with Ravel before copyright got in the way. In Estonia, Tõnis Mägi used a hypnotic bolero rhythm for Koit, which became one of the songs of the Singing Revolution. Angélique Kidjo later heard something African in Ravel’s repetitions and rebuilt the piece with layered voices.

Love Me Tender sounded like a new Elvis Presley ballad in 1956. The melody was already ninety-five years old.It began as Aura Lea, published in Cincinnati in 1861 with words by W. W. Fosdick and music by George R. Poulton. The song circulated during the Civil War, became a West Point graduation tune, and was already appearing in Hollywood before Elvis was born.Then Fox cast Elvis in a western called The Reno Brothers. Ken Darby wrote new words to the old melody, Elvis recorded them, and the result became such a huge hit that the studio renamed the film Love Me Tender.This episode follows the tune from nineteenth-century sheet music through Civil War culture, Frances Farmer, Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Linda Ronstadt, and finally Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, which could not use Elvis recordings but could use Aura Lea.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star is one of those songs you seem to know before anyone teaches it to you.But Mozart did not write it.The melody first appears in eighteenth-century France, where one early set of words is about a young woman telling her mother about a shepherd who has talked his way into her arms. Mozart later wrote twelve piano variations on the tune. Jane Taylor's poem The Star arrived only in 1806, and the words and melody were joined later still.This episode follows six remarkably durable notes through Mozart, the Alphabet Song, Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter, Saint-Saëns, Edison's talking doll, Dohnányi, Steeleye Span, and Dead Space.Along the way, the tune keeps changing jobs without really changing itself: love song, piano exercise, nursery rhyme, teaching tool, musical joke, technological experiment, and horror soundtrack.Apparently, if a melody is simple enough for a child to remember, it is also difficult for culture to get rid of.

In the Hall of the Mountain King begins with a tiny tune in the low strings and ends with what sounds like the orchestra being overrun.Grieg wrote it for Peer Gynt, where Peer arrives at the Mountain King’s court on a giant pig, considers marrying the king’s daughter, and discovers that the trolls would quite like to boil him. The music follows the scene perfectly: the melody barely changes, but it gets faster, louder, and more crowded. Grieg simply keeps admitting more trolls.This episode follows that little tune after it escaped the theatre. It becomes a murderer’s whistle in Fritz Lang’s M, a Duke Ellington big-band number, a rock instrumental for Nero and the Gladiators, an experiment by The Who and ELO, metal with Savatage and Apocalyptica, synth-pop with Erasure, mounting electronic pressure in The Social Network, and finally, inevitably, music for actual animated trolls.The tune survives because it is almost absurdly efficient. You hear it once. You know it. Then it starts coming closer.

The Imperfect Enjoyment sounds like a polite complaint about dinner.It is actually a seventeenth-century poem about premature ejaculation, impotence, wounded pride, and a man becoming so furious with his own penis that he starts addressing it as a military deserter.John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, wrote the poem in the 1670s. It begins with two eager lovers and every expectation of spectacular sex. The narrator finishes almost immediately, cannot recover, and reacts as though something much more serious than disappointing sex has occurred. Corinna, who has considerably more reason to complain, is remarkably patient.What makes the poem funny is the gap between the problem and the response. Rochester’s verse remains elegant and controlled while his narrator completely falls apart.This short bonus episode follows the disaster from optimism to shame, rage, treason, and one extraordinarily generous proposal for solving Corinna’s problem.

One of the most familiar piano pieces in the world may have the wrong woman's name on it.Beethoven wrote the piece we call Für Elise around 1810, but he never published it. The manuscript later disappeared. When Ludwig Nohl finally printed the music in 1867, he said it was dedicated “Für Elise.” Perhaps he read it correctly. Perhaps the page actually said “Für Therese.” Nobody can check.This episode follows the mystery of Elise, but also the stranger life of the melody itself. Those first few notes have escaped the piano lesson and turned up in Charlie Brown, French chanson, Giorgio Moroder, Italian pop, heavy metal, Whitney Houston, Nas, K-pop and Jon Batiste.Almost everyone who borrows the piece keeps the same little turn between E and D sharp. It is hesitant, instantly recognizable, and apparently impossible to kill.Along the way, the episode asks a simpler question: why did this tiny unpublished bagatelle become one of the melodies everybody knows?

A thank-you to Courtney Love for sharing our In the Pines episode on Instagram.

You know Ode to Joy. You may know it from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a church hymn, A Clockwork Orange, the European anthem, Sister Act 2, or possibly a few suspicious seconds of Mr. Brightside.What is strange is how quietly it begins. Before the huge choir arrives, Beethoven gives the melody to the cellos and double basses: a plain little tune that hardly seems capable of carrying everything later piled onto it.This episode follows that melody from Schiller’s 1785 poem and Beethoven’s Ninth through Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee, the Seekers, Miguel Ríos, Wendy Carlos, Rainbow, Leonard Bernstein, Lauryn Hill, Bright Eyes, the Piano Guys and ATEEZ.Along the way, Ode to Joy becomes hymn, pop song, electronic nightmare, political anthem, guitar riff and K-pop spectacle. The tune survives all of it because Beethoven made something unusually simple: a melody that a single cello can whisper and thousands of people can sing together.

Most people know Cotton Eye Joe as the 1994 Rednex hit: fiddle, banjo, enormous dance beat, and a chorus capable of making an entire wedding party regret its knees the next morning.But Rednex arrived very late.Cotton-Eyed Joe was already circulating in the American South in the nineteenth century, long before recording technology could capture it. Nobody knows who wrote it, what its first melody sounded like, or even exactly what “cotton-eyed” means. What survives is the accusation: Joe arrives, takes somebody’s lover, and disappears.This episode follows the song from early fiddle recordings and western swing through Nina Simone’s mournful 1959 performance, Terry Callier, Asleep at the Wheel, the Chieftains and Ricky Skaggs, and finally Rednex.Along the way, the same tune keeps switching between heartbreak and party music. Slow it down and Joe becomes a ghost. Speed it up and everybody dances.Maybe that is why the song survived. It is barely fixed enough to be broken.

Carmen walks into a public square and explains her theory of love: it is a wild bird. You cannot command it, bargain with it, or make it stay.That argument became one of the most recognizable melodies in opera.This episode follows the Habanera from Georges Bizet’s Carmen back to Sebastián Iradier’s 1863 song El Arreglito and further still to the Cuban dance rhythm that crossed the Atlantic and returned to Europe transformed. From there, the melody keeps travelling: into the earliest surviving recording of the aria in 1891, Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones, children’s television, Malcolm McLaren, Beyoncé commercials, Doritos ads, and Stromae.Across all those versions, the musical machinery remains remarkably durable: a repeated groove, a descending chromatic hook, a bright refrain, and a warning disguised as seduction.The episode asks why the Habanera still works after 150 years. The answer is already there in Carmen’s first entrance: love may choose you, but that does not mean you own it.