Gigi Sherrell Norwood--Scary Music!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Counting down the last ten days to the most frightening day of the year, we have just the thing to get you in the mood! Here's our Jungle Red friend and my very good pal, Gigi Norwood, with a rundown on the scariest of tunes!

GIGI NORWOOD: When Debs turned to me the other day, searching for blog post ideas for her week at bat on Jungle Red, we brainstormed our way through Halloween décor, pumpkin-centric agriculture, and spice cake recipes before I suggested she look at festive holiday music that is absolutely NOT for Christmas.

Like, say, that Crypt Kickers classic, Monster Mash. Or the ooky, spooky theme from The Addams Family. When I started dragging Camille Saint-Saëns and Edvard Grieg into the conversation, she said, “Why don’t you write it?” So here I am, guest blogging, and delighted to be back on Jungle Red.

When the conversation turns to Halloween music, there are a lot of popular options, from Ghost Riders in the Sky to Thriller. You want witches?  We have a whole coven, including Donovan’s Season of the Witch, Nina Simone’s I Put a Spell on You, and Bobby Bare’s Marie Laveau. Monsters? Check out Sheb Wooley’s Purple People-Eater. And ghosts? You need only dip into folk music’s murder ballads to find scores of those.  My personal favorite ghost ballad is Long Black Veil, which is eerie enough, even before you realize that the ghost is not the woman in black.  It’s the singer, watching her walk the hills.

But Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt Kickers must win some kind of prize for the most enduring goofball Halloween song of all time. A novelty song written to play off Bobby Pickett’s amusing imitation of Boris Karloff, it tells the story of the living dead, including Frankenstein’s monster and Count Dracula, dancing their Halloween away, doing some reanimated form of the Mashed Potato.  High art that combined satire, homage, and a catchy tune to become a number one hit and spend more than 60 years hanging out on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Pickett’s song might have had a lot of contemporary cultural references, but the idea of monsters, ghosts, witches and demons dancing the night away is very old. 

Folklore from many lands speaks of a witches’ sabbath, held around All Hallows or sometimes Midsummer eve, where women and men, intent on evil, met up with their demonic overlord at midnight to dance and celebrate with horrible rituals.  I should point out that there is no historical evidence that celebrations like this actually happened anywhere in Europe, Asia, or the Americas, although your friendly local pagan group will probably throw a fun party on Halloween night.

Facts don’t matter in folklore, though.  Imagination rules the night, illuminated only by bonfire light, and by the late 1800s classical composers were turning to their national folklore for inspiration. 

In January, 1875, two takes on the monster’s ball theme made their debut.  Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King was part of a suite of music he wrote for Henrik Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt.  It underscores a scene where the legendary folk hero and trickster Peer Gynt sneaks into the throne room of the Troll King, deep inside a mountain. There he is surrounded by partying goblins, trolls, and monsters, none of whom are all that happy to see him.  He has to make a run for it if he ever hopes to survive.

That same month, French composer Camille Saint-Saëns debuted his take on the witches’ sabbath with Danse Macabre. In Saint-Saëns’ version, the clock strikes midnight, and the Devil lifts his bow to play a lovely violin solo which brings all the dead to life. They dance to the Devil’s music until the cock crows at dawn and they all go back to being dead again.  Not so far off from Monster Mash after all.

Maybe the scariest of classical takes on the all-night ghoulish dance party is Night on Bald Mountain.  Written in 1865 by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, it was stuck into a whole range of plays, operas, and chorales that didn’t work or never got staged.  Scholars believe Mussorgsky never heard it played in public.  But after his death in 1881, friends got together to sort through his papers, doing what they could to preserve his music.  Night on Bald Mountain fell into the hands of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who reworked it into the piece we know now, primarily as the scariest sequence in Walt Disney’s 1940 animated classic Fantasia. 

All of which is to say that, if you have the urge to dance your Halloween night away with ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties, go for it!  The tradition is probably at least as old as Christmas and who knows?  It might turn out to be a graveyard smash.

DEBS: Reds and readers, have we missed any of your scary faves?

Gigi Norwood was more or less doomed to a life as an arts professional. She was listening to classical music in the womb and spent her summer vacations roaming art museums the way other kids went to Disneyland. 

As an adult she has alternated between writing jobs and music presentations.  She is a founding partner of the independent press Weird Sisters Publishing, LLC, and has a day job back on the production side of the desk as Director of Concert Operations for the Dallas Winds. 

Writing as G. S. Norwood, she is the author of Deep Ellum Pawn and Deep Ellum Blues and is currently at work on a third Deep Ellum story plus a novel.