Somebody's gonna hurt someone before this song is through. That's because all Tragedy Songs have one thing in common: Someone dies. It's usually at the end of the song and due to some tragic circumstances (an accident, a murder, a pedicure gone awry) and it almost always takes the life of someone who doesn't deserve to die or doesn't have to (or both). For this special edition of the jukebox, I'm waving the "it has to be a song I like" stipulation and allowing songs to be selected based on their kitsch value. (This is what is known as the "so bad they're good" amendment.)

The ultimate "my girlfriend got killed in a car wreck song." Someone else recorded the original version and Pearl Jam revised it recently, but this is the one I heard on WLS in 1964 and the one that was a top ten hit single. This sad but catchy lament is sung by the broken hearted boyfriend, who while on a date with his sweetheart swerves his daddy's car to avoid a stalled clunker in the road, but crashes his pop's wheels anyway. The accident is fatal, not to him but his girlfriend, who dies in his arms as he gives her that one last kiss (no tongue). "Oh where, oh where can my baby be..."

The King of the Gunfighter Ballads gives us the genre's prototype. Singing in first person, Robbins in a shy cowboy who gets the hots for the wicked Faleena and confesses his feelings by gunning down the first man who buys her a drink at Rosaís Canteena. Realizing his faux pas, he escapes on a stolen horse and, if nothing else, has himself an amusing little story to tell the grand kids someday. But the murderiní bastard gets horny for his Faleena and rides back to the scene of the crime, where some pissed off cowboys pump him full of lead. As he lies dying, Faleena cradles him and plants a wet one on his cheek, making it all seem worth while. What an idiot.

A boy from the right side of the tracks meets a girl from Shanty Town and they fall in love. The parents of the boy tell him to stop seeing his poor white trash girlfriend at a time when parents could do that sort of thing and make it stick. He cries himself to sleep each night, she is found floating face down in the river. Sorta like a modern day Romeo & Juliet only the guy is a chicken shit weenie.

Out of one hundred men tested, only three are selected to wear the Green Beret. Yes, youíve gotta be pretty tough to carry off a fashion statement like that in the armed forces, considering youíre bunking down with men who know hand-to-hand combat and carry loaded rifles. In this song, a soldier makes the cut to be one of the elite, but he doesnít make it back home alive from the war in Viet Nam. His dying request: "Put silver wings on my sonís chest..."

Long before the interracial love affair of "Brother Louie," there was this intertribal romance between the title character and Little White Dove, the squaw of his affections that came from the wrong side of the river. Their love is forbidden but one day their passion gets the best of them and they try swimming to each other from opposite banks of the wide, nasty river. They drown, but at least they can hang out together in that great hunting ground in the sky. (Note of interest: This song was written by the Big Bopper, who himself was involved in a real life tragedy when he perished in that infamous plane crash with Buddy Holly and Ricthie Valens, but failed to get a movie made based on his life story.)

One of the few tragedy tunes where someone dies at the beginning of the song. The news that Billy Joe McAllister did a swan dive off the Tallahatchee Bridge causes a stir in a sleepy little southern town and provides the perfect dinner table conversation for the narrator and her gossip hungry family. This was a big stinkiní hit for Miss Gentry in 1967 and propelled to her such dizzying heights that she even hosted her own summer variety series for a whole month. Why did young Billy Joe end his life? What did he and the girl that looked a lot like Bobbie Gentry toss off the bridge? The answers to these questions would have to wait until 1976 when Max "Jethro Bodine" Baer directed the film version starring Robbie Benson and raised an even more puzzling question. How did Benson get to be a movie actor?

The classic good girl attracted to bad boy coming of age story with the usual disastrous results. The other girls express their envy and disbelief by providing the background vocals as a high school girl tells her sad tale of Jimmy, a misunderstood hooligan on a motorbike that she met at the candy store (where all the tough bikers hang out). They fall in love, but her dad tells her to find someone new and, naturally, she has to comply. So she tells Jimmy it's over, gives him a smooch and he promptly rides off and wrecks his bike right before her eyes. As if his death wasn't hard enough to handle, she then has to deal with those stares of pity at high school every day until graduation.

There's something about the Old West that makes it a ripe setting for these kind of tragic ditties. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that guys used to walk around with a chip on their shoulder and a gun strapped to their waist. Anyway, this song employs the common technique of foreshadowing trouble by having one character tell another to stay away from it. In this case a young gunslinger wannabe is told by his mom to leave his guns at home. But like most boys his age, he didn't listen to his mother and, as always, she was right. He winds up dead on a barroom floor with echoes of "I told you so" and "eat your carrots" reverberating in his head.

Another story of young love that ends in tragedy. Julieís dad smacks her around after he finds out whatís really going on when she and Joey are in her room listening to those Barry White albums. Julie calls up Joey and warns him to not come over because sheís in the middle of an extreme tough love session with her old man. Joey ignores her request and rushes to her rescue. When he gets there, Julieís pop is lurking in the shadows with a gun. "Watch out!" shouts Julie as she leaps in between her lover and her father, catching a bullet in the process. She dies in Joeyís arms, singing her final plea, "Daddy, please donít. It wasnít it fault. He means so much to me. Daddy, please donít. Weíre gonna get married..."

Not since the protagonist in Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" shot a man in Reno just to watch him die has such a senseless killing led to a main character's unenviable predicament. Here a guy is holed up and preparing for a shoot out with the law because he killed the man who said something bad about his woman. Now I can't be 100% sure this loser dies at the end of the song, but his "you won't take me alive" attitude combined with the rain of gun fire heard on the record's fade out leads me to believe the odds of him pushing up daisies instead of banging out license plates are pretty good.

He wouldn't listen. She told him to keep his head low and not be a fool with his life, but guess what? The first time they asked for a volunteer to do something risky, there's dumb ass Billy with his hand in the air. Now he's dead and all she's got to show for his heroic deed is a stupid letter. Actually, she doesn't even have that because I heard she threw it away.

Okay, I gotta admit this one is a piece of crap and makes the jukebox only because itís too damn hokey to ignore. Good lord, they played the living daylights out of this record when it was a hit back in 1968. And it was soooo sad, right? Not only because the guyís wife dies at the end (Iím assuming when sheís taken away by angels, they donít mean she was drafted by the baseball team), but because "Honey" just sat around the house all day waiting for her hubby to come home from work. "Kinda dumb, kinda smart?" Kinda kept, if you ask me. (Footnote: Goldsboro went on to have several more crappy hits and star in his own syndicated TV show, where every week he sang those crappy favorites and amazed people will his ability to make frog noises without moving his lips - or brain.)

Did you ever have "one of those days"? A guy stops at a bar for a drink, finds out from his best friend that his wife has been cheating on him, but the best friend tells him not to get mad because heís one of the guys sheís been cheating with. No harm meant, of course, but the poor sap decides to set things right by running home for pappyís rifle and teaching his buddy a lesson about retribution. Apparently, someone beats him to it and when he finds the dead body of the man he was going to kill, he fires a shot in the air to flag down the Georgia Patrol. Whoops. Without modern forensics to help his case, a man standing over a fresh corpse with a smoking rifle in the deep south is about as open and shut as you can get. A quickie trial is held and based on the evidence and the judgeís motion that "supperís waitiní at home and I gotta get to it," the man is found guilty and hung before dessert is served. Ah, if only the murder had been committed in Cabot Cove. Then Jessica Fletcher would have deducted that the real killer was the suspectís little sister, played convincingly by Vicki Lawrence in a rare dramatic role.

"Death on wheels" takes on a whole new meaning as the bass player for The Who exhibits his morbid sense of humor in this parody of the teenager tearjerkers of the fifties and sixties. Kate likes to roller skate, but one day she becomes too daring and rolls head on into a truck on the motor way. "They took her to the hospital, but it was far too late. She died in the ambulance and that night, that night I burned my skates." Now sheís in that great skating rink in the sky where the rentals are free and itís always "all skate."

Ben Cartwright sings! Well, more like he talks over some music. And no, this isn't a song about the Beatles' drummer. It's another Old West melodrama with an ironic ending. The good lawman (Greene) comes face to face with Ringo, the evil gunman he saved and befriended at the beginning of the song. Ringo repays his debt to Greene by not shooting him full of holes, but is killed himself when he walks into an ambush by Greeneís trigger happy posse. Hmm, talking instead of singing his rhymes and hanging out with a gun toting posse. Could it be Pa Cartwright was the original gangsta rapper?

On a cold and gray Chicago morn, a poor little baby child is born in the ghetto. He grows up to be an angry young man who buys a gun, steals a car and he tries to run but he donít get far in the ghetto. And as he dies on a cold and gray Chicago morn, another little baby child is born in the ghetto. Ah, the circle of life.

Before he became the king of pork sausage, Jimmy Dean (the singer not the actor) had a big bad hit with this story song about the mysterious miner who drifted into town and pretty much kept to himself until the day the mine collapsed. Trapped under the earth with twenty other miners, it was up to the giant of man known as Big Bad John to save the day. With his Atlas like strength, John is able to clean and jerk an opening and everybody scrambles through it to safety above ground. Everybody, that is, except Big Bad John. The mine caves in, John is buried alive and Jimmy Dean wound up trading wisecracks with Rowlf the Dog on an ABC variety series from 1963-1966.

Featured in The Beatlesí Magical Mystery Tour film, this is the Bonzosí twisted but funny take on the ever popular fatal car crash song. "Someoneís gonna make you pay your fair," warns singer Viv Stanshall, but Cutie doesnít quite grasp the lineís ominous double meaning. Sheís killed when the cab driver tries to beat a red light and then must spend eternity with the meter running