![]() It began as a poem by Chapin's wife, Sandy her first husband's father was a New York politician and they had a strained relationship. At the end, the grown-up son is too busy for his elderly father. ![]() As everyone who ever attended summer camp knows, it's about a father who is too busy to spend time with his son. Harry Chapin – ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’ĪM radio was full of tearjerker songs in the 1970s, but Harry Chapin's 1974 hit "Cat's in the Cradle" is the king of them all. The version on MTV Unplugged is even more intense. Rarely has Kurt sounded this vulnerable and raw. He recorded the track solo and acoustic, and the rest of the band later cut their parts. The slow ballad, which recounts Kurt Cobain's supposed time sleeping under a bridge in Aberdeen, Washington wraps up Nevermind. There's a lot of competition for the title of saddest Nirvana song, but "Something in the Way" is a very strong candidate. Alan Jackson sang the song at his funeral earlier this year. Other singers would have had difficulty pulling it off, but Jones managed to convey the song without a hint of sap. She attends his funeral, even though he spent decades pining for her in vain. Simply put, it's about a guy whose friend holds onto his lost love until the day he dies. It came out years after Jones' commercial peak and he even thought it was too sappy, but he recorded it anyway and it shot to the top of the country charts. There are a lot of truly sad country songs, but George Jones' 1980 hit "He Stopped Loving Her Today" stands above almost all of them. ![]() George Jones – ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’ They have played the song about 480 times, and it always gets the crowd to sing "I know someday you'll have a beautiful life/ I know you'll be a star in somebody else's sky" at the top of their lungs. They were thoroughly impressed by his work and offered him the job. Guitarist Stone Gossard cut the demo before he'd even met Eddie Vedder, who later wrote the lyrics while he traveled to Seattle to meet the band. Pearl Jam were still gigging in Seattle clubs as Mookie Blaylock when they debuted "Black," a sad tale of lost love. The chorus is one of the saddest in pop history: "There's a hole in daddy's arm/ Where all the money goes/ Jesus Christ died for nothing/ I suppose." He dies at the end after "popping his last balloon" in a "room that smells just like death." He's eventually reduced to robbery to feed his habit. John Prine managed a rare feat in 1971 when he combined them both in his hit song "Sam Stone." It's about a Vietnam War veteran returning home with a taste for smack. Injured war vets and heroin addicts are both great subjects for sad songs. Alice in Chains play it at most every show, and it's a wonderful tribute to the spirit and resolve of Staley. This ballad was never a single and it sounds unlike their famous works from this period, but it touched a nerve with fans and remains one of their most popular tunes. When you listen to this song today, it's impossible not to think about his death, and lines like "I'd feel better dead" are positively chilling. Like many songs on this list, the 1994 Alice in Chains classic "Nutshell" took on a new meaning after the singer Layne Staley died tragically at a young age. It's since been covered by everybody from Elvis Presley to Johnny Cash to Yo La Tengo. That's probably because the message is so universal and his raw pain is impossible to ignore. Williams wrote hundreds of songs and scored many huge hits during his brief life, but this is one of the few you still hear all the time, all these decades later. Three years before he died, Hank Williams poured out all the pain from his failing marriage to his wife Audrey Sheppard into this masterpiece. ![]() Hank Williams – ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’
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