Often on the not-very-powerful oldies station in southern NH, I hear a late 50s, early 60s song about a teenager who died in a car accident, sappily written from the perspective of the now-bereft boyfriend or girlfriend. They were very big then. I have read analysis that views them as morality tales like horror movies, cautionary folktales memento mori. No one writes those songs anymore, and writers have drawn cultural conclusions from that.
I have a simpler explanation: they didn't have seatbelts then.
5 comments:
Boyfriends who died in combat, too: people still die that way, but it's not a popular theme for songs. For a while we did a brisk business in songs about gangstas shot to death.
Yes, seat-belts are probably very important, seat belts as well as air-bags and better occupant-protection due to crash-testing data. But deaths/100,000 population for deaths from car accidents have dropped faster for teen-age victims than for others, so probably "graduated" licensing and raised drinking-age have something to do with it also.
I saw an 8:30AM distracted-driver single car incident in front of my house about 10 days ago that destroyed a power-pole as well as the car -- the driver was uninjured, thanks to the air-bags, seat-belt, and integrity of the passenger compartment. I commented to a few people that this would have been very bloody in older car designs.
There is a graph of deaths/year in the following article that has a few obvious inflection points that I'm not associating with any technology or policy change: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/teenagers -- but of course I could be forgetting or unaware of such changes.
There is chatter in the culture magazines that teenagers aren't very into driving anymore.
I also think that sort of sentimentality went out of fashion in youth music, even though a few thousand kids a year still die from car accidents.
Douglas2
Last Kiss?
There's an innocence in that song. No blame is placed. The love is pure, unconsummated.
Fast forward 10, 20, 50 years and, it's an urban legend that there will be a tragic car wreck killing popular seniors on graduation night. That happened just often enough to perpetuate this, but the manner changed. As 2 lane roads were replaced by 4 and 6 lane highways and interstates, decapitation by trailers of 18 wheelers became the horror. Blame was placed on drunk drivers, then drugged drivers, now distracted drivers. Teenaged lovers are now replaced by single moms and their babies. Three or four verses and a catchy chorus can't capture all that societal pressure and judgment.
Last Kiss. Driver hits parked car. Kills girlfriend. Blames God.
Donna B.
Fast forward 10, 20, 50 years and, it's an urban legend that there will be a tragic car wreck killing popular seniors on graduation night.
Or a suburban legend? :)
In my hometown there was an accident near the end of the school year where a half dozen teens riding in the back of a truck were killed in a crash. I had graduated from high school several years before, so wasn't closely acquainted with those killed, though one of those killed had been in my senor year gym class. The accident didn't make a song, but years later someone who survived the crash wrote a chapter about it in his memoir. I remember talking with him and others about those killed in the accident, when he was still in a leg cast. I later worked at a hospital where the driver responsible for the wreck worked in the kitchen- he was driving the truck that crashed.
Over the years, I made the assumption that the crash occurred on graduation night. Memories fade, apparently. When I read about the accident in the aforementioned memoir, I found out that, contrary to my memory, the accident occurred in May, a month before graduation. In addition, my memory had misplaced the place of the accident.
Accident inspiring rock song. It may also work in reverse. Consider Bobby Fuller's I Fought the Law and his mysterious death.
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