The world’s oldest surviving complete song is the ‘Seikilos Epitaph’. Around the first century AD, its music and lyrics were engraved in Greek on a tombstone in what is now Turkey. What’s remarkable about this song is that a melody written around 2000 years ago still resonates today with anyone familiar with Western music: it’s a sweet, sad, memorable tune. The lyrics, meanwhile, are the stuff of songs through the ages: ‘Life exists only for a short while/And time demands an end.’
We do not know what instrument it was intended to be played on: perhaps a lyre, or a flute. But, inevitably, it has been picked up and reshaped by modern-day musicians in a panoply of styles: acoustic singer-songwriter, solo harpist, jazz, even dubstep.
This is what happens to good songs: once they’ve been written and released, they take on a life of their own, reshaped and given new life, often across the generations. And that is what this book is about: a compilation of weekly columns written for FT Weekend, it contains the stories of 50 songs that have been born, reborn reinvigorated, re-imagined, and sometimes hideously mangled.
The Life of a Song is not about singers, or stars, or chart success – although of course they come into the story. It is about the music itself. Each of the songs we and the writers have chosen has a rich biography of its own, often transcending and moving between musical genres. Here you will find a song that is now speeding through space, songs that have given rise to court cases, songs that have become funeral favourites, songs that have been used – and abused – by politicians. And every song in this compilation, from pop to jazz, folk, musicals and other genres, has something to say about the human spirit and the experience of being alive that makes them, like the ‘Seikilos Epitaph’, endlessly young.
David Cheal and Jan Dalley