HeyJaredSongs from the Dead: 10-Minute Histories of Legendary Songs
Every Monday, we take one legendary song, uncover its strange history, and play a brand-new reinterpretation.In under 10 minutes, we try to bring old songs back to life: murder ballads, folk standards, lost anthems, and melodies that refused to disappear.If you like music…
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Sep 10, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
Latest episodes
Boatswain: Byron's Epitaph for His Dog (Bonus episode) (opens the original)
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This time, Songs from the Dead is doing something unusual. Instead of an old song, this bonus episode begins with a poem. In 1808, twenty-year-old George Gordon Byron's Newfoundland dog Boatswain died of rabies at Newstead Abbey. Byron had nursed him through the disease despite knowing the danger, then built him an extraordinary monument and wrote an epitaph that begins with the death of a dog and ends as an attack on humanity itself. The monument is still there at Newstead Abbey today. This epi
Whiskey in the Jar: Betrayal Ballad, Then and Now (opens the original)
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"Whiskey in the Jar" is a betrayal ballad that keeps changing clothes. At its core, the story is simple: a robber meets Captain Farrell, steals his money, takes it home to Jenny or Molly, and is betrayed while he sleeps. His weapons are sabotaged, the authorities arrive, and the chorus keeps arriving too: "musha ring dum a do dum a da". The song may reach back to seventeenth-century Irish robber ballads, with older connections to the story of Patrick Fleming. By the nineteenth century, versions
Where to Start with Songs from the Dead (opens the original)
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Every Monday, we take one legendary song, uncover its strange history, and play a brand-new reinterpretation. In about ten minutes, we try to bring old songs back to life: murder ballads, folk standards, lost anthems, and melodies that refused to disappear. If you like music history, dark stories, and fresh versions of ancient songs, this is for you. So, where should you start?
Prodigal Son: No Way to Get Along (opens the original)
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Robert Wilkins put two men on the same road. In 1929, he recorded "That’s No Way to Get Along", a blues song about a wounded man trying to get away. Women have treated him badly. He wants to tell his mother, find a train, and leave his troubles behind. More than thirty years later, Wilkins used the same musical body for a very different journey. Now the traveller is the prodigal son from the Gospel of Luke: hungry, ashamed, and heading home after wasting his inheritance. The guitar still walks t
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor: Bach to Muse, Eminem, and the Dance Floor (opens the original)
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You know Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor even if you have never seen the title. Three sharp notes, a pause, then the famous fall down the organ keyboard. In cartoons and horror films, it usually means castles, capes, lightning, or unsafe laboratory conditions. But BWV 565 is more than Gothic scenery. This episode looks at why the piece works so well: the theatrical freedom of the toccata, the organized machinery of the fugue, the enormous sound of the organ, the doubled octaves, the pauses,
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