Episode 18: "The Devil's Music - Part One"

American Hauntings Podcast

Cody Beck and Troy Taylor

Spirituality, True Crime, History, Religion & Spirituality, Tv & Film, Film Reviews

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2026

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There has always been something strange about music. It has captured the imaginations of people in ways that nothing else has ever been able to do. This was true during the days of traveling minstrels, when folk music emerged from the Appalachian Mountains, when the first jazz music was played in the brothels of New Orleans, and when the first bluegrass songs rattled across the American South. But when the first notes of the blues – which eventually gave birth to rock-n-roll – began to be heard from roadhouses and juke joints, the fundamentalists were convinced that the Devil himself had invented his own brand of music.

And maybe they’re right. The origins of rock-n-roll are murky, at best. It is, by its nature, difficult to define, and even harder to explain. There may never be a single, clear-cut, universally accepted explanation for the origins of rock-n-roll. From its inception, it’s been twisted by myth, folklore, legend, rumor, and fact. There is no other kind of music – or even type of popular culture – that has such a rich history of depravity, untimely deaths, bizarre curses, and lives filled with excess.

It’s almost as if someone sold their soul to the Devil to end up with the kind of lifestyle that music can offer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You can find this song almost anywhere.
0:07.0	Times have changed. It's not like you have to blow the dust off an old vinyl you found in the back of a record store.
0:14.0	Unless you want to, so that it sounds like it was supposed to when it was released.
0:20.0	But these days just pull up a playlist for Billy Holiday,
0:24.3	which you should really have,
0:27.1	and find what was once one of her most popular songs,
0:31.2	a tune with the uplifting name of Gloomy Sunday.
0:37.0	Now, here's a little bit of a sample for it, but then go ahead and listen to the entire song.
0:45.8	I'll be here when you get back. Sunday is gloomy.
1:01.0	My hours are slumberless.
1:07.0	Here is the shadows I live with our lumberless. I should have told you should make sure that your window.
1:18.6	I should have told you though, before you went to listen to the entire song, you should make sure that your windows are closed. The medicine cabinet is locked.
1:29.8	The knives have all been put away and the gas has been turned off on the stove.
1:35.9	Why? Well, because Gloomy Sunday is also known as the Hungarian suicide song.
1:44.0	Legend has it that it sent a lot of people to their deaths and ruined the lives of others,
1:50.4	including the beautiful and talented Billy Holiday.
1:54.3	The song was written in 1933 by a Hungarian pianist and composer named Reslo Siris. It had a different title then, which
2:04.2	translated roughly to, The World is Ending. It's not a very cheerful tune, about the despair that
2:13.4	had been caused by the Great War, and it ended with a prayer for the sins of people everywhere.
2:19.7	You're probably not surprised to hear that it wasn't a big hit.
2:24.7	A short time later, however, a poet named Laslo Javar, got hold of it and added his own lyrics to the melody.
2:33.1	He turned it into a song about a young man
	...

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