What Are Some Good Songs About Prison/crime/being on Trial for My School Project?
Question by Devin Bennett: What are some good songs about prison/crime/being on trial for my school project?
I’m doing a soundtrack/play list of songs for a school project that deal with the book “Monster” by Walter Dean Myers. I need a good set of clean songs for it. I need about ten please.
Best answer:
Answer by Lucy P
Off the top of my head:
about half of the songs Johnny Cash did for starters,
e.g.
Folsom Prison Blues,
Cocaine Blues (as opposed to Townes Van Zandt’s Cocaine Blues, or the one Van Zandt did anyway, which is more about addiction, but Cash’s version starts with “Early one mornin’ while makin’ the rounds/ I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down”)
Delia
(and there are more– including one about being hanged, which is called 29 Minutes to Go or similar, and he was in a band called The Highwaymen, although ironically, their song The Highwayman is kind of more about reincarnation)
And then there are covers he did, like
Long Black Veil, which I think is probably traditional.
…There are a lot of murder ballads (that is a genre of songs) and he probably did more than I mentioned, including:
Knoxville Girl
Pretty Polly
Little Omie
A lot of those are based on traditional English ones, and there are more murder ballads in existence that I’ve listed e.g.
Henry Lee
And then there’s rock– a lot of these are a bit goth (the 80s art rock kind)
Well, of course Nick Cave, who did a couple of the aforementioned and wrote several himself including….
The Mercy Seat
The Wild Rose
…and he did a country song (presumably Australian) called There’s No Night out in the Jail,
Also an entire album called Murder Ballads. (He also did some songs that aren’t on there that are so twisted I can’t really recommend you include them because they are disturbing enough to get you in trouble. A lot of the goth bands did songs about crime that were pretty graphic too).
There’s a band called Murder by Death that did an album called In Bocca Al Luppo, which is almost entirely comprised of songs about crimes. (The band’s name itself comes from a Neil Simon play satirizing murder mysteries).
Then there’s the currently somewhat obscure and very guidance-counselor-alarming:
I Don’t like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats-
Then there are some ’60s things
Jimi Hendrix’s Hey Joe comes to mind
Simon and Garfunkel did something about robbing a liquor store I think.
And more recent mainstream
U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday is arguably a crime song
ETA: Rats! Won’t let me do HTML. Oh well, I’ll leave the tags in and you can open it in another program, because they do make it easier to read) Oh, and while checking Nick Cave’s song for tags it occurred to me that Waltzin’ Matilda is about crime and punishment too.
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