There are so many songs to choose from and the list changes each time I look at it - I'm tempted to include Wagner's Ride Of The Valkyrie or Ding Dong The Witch is Dead - from The Wizard of Oz but, at the moment, my funeral hit list would be something like:
Sarabande - Georg Friedrich HandelI went to a friend's funeral at Golders Green Crematorium some years ago and he had Abba's Super Trouper to play him out. As the coffin rolled into the flames, half the mourners cried and the other half laughed - not a dry eye in the house.
Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now - The Smiths
A Day In The Life - The Beatles
All Tomorrow's Parties - The Velvet Underground
The Man That Got Away - Judy Garland
Theme From Midnight Cowboy - John Barry
Go West - Village People
Are You Lonesome Tonight (Laughing Version) - Elvis Presley
Nimrod (Enigma Variations) - Edward Elgar
What's your curtain call music?
I am the resurrection - The Stone Roses (Simon T)
ReplyDeleteThere's a passage in Richard Dawkins' book Unweaving the Rainbow that is very apt and would be well suited to be read at anyone's funeral. It goes like this:
ReplyDelete"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"
I find it fantastically phrased. And very true.
Good choice, Simon; I'd sing along to that at your graveside (but not just yet!).
ReplyDeleteWim, Dawkins has a fantastic way with words. He is to atheism and Neo-Darwinism what the classical poets were to God. Have you read his line where he compares the chances of a chimp randomly typing the complete works of Shakespeare with his chances of randomly moving his arms and swinging through the trees like a chimp...? Inspired!