Saddest songs ever?....I'll start,

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

53. "Suicide is Painless" form M*A*S*H

Trivia: The 14-year-old son of Robert Altman, Mike Altman, wrote the lyrics to the theme song "Suicide is Painless". Because of its inclusion in the subsequent TV series, he continued to get residuals throughout its run and syndication. His father was paid $75,000 for directing but his son eventually made about $2,000,000 in song royalties.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066026/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv


OT personal note: In the 80s I worked for this company with building wide radio for background music. The older women in the manufacturing had basically dictatorial control of what station was tuned and their preference was this small station that had a stack of maybe 6 or 7 records that were all old sad love songs. I rather disliked all of those and had a special hatred for one or two of them. The two younger guys that worked in our lab as techs hated everyone of those songs.

One Saturday morning, after a week of 12 hour days, Andy just couldn't take it any longer. He said it was making him suicidal. I talked to someone who had a key to the closet where the receiver was kept and he changed the station to something contemporary. That lasted about a half hour before complaints forced a return to the original station of sad misery.

Undaunted by this setback, I mentioned 2 interesting fact to our lab techs; first, our principle product at the time was a radio jamming system for the Army; second was that the frequency of the offending station was in the covered range of our product. Several hours of peaceful silence followed.