It’s hard to consider musical choices for your funeral service
When I was a child, funerals were such sombre affairs. Everyone wore black, there were tears, and it always seemed to rain. You could tell when people were at a funeral by the state of their good black shoes, covered in mud and in need of a good polish.
I try and avoid funerals. They are still sad affairs, but there is a tendency now to dispense with much of the formalities that were previously associated with church services and graveyard prayers as the dearly departed is laid to rest.
I guess, in part, the changes have happened because more and more people in the West are choosing now to be cremated. These funeral services tend to last half an hour and, if the service before hand drags on over the allotted time and there’s a backup of services, you could end saying goodbye to some one else’s great uncle Peter instead of auntie Paula.
Besides, it’s often hard to recognise second cousins you haven’t seen in years, and when you did see them last, they had long hair. Now they’re bald and half blind. So you could be listening to a service, looking around, trying to pick out cousin Tim, convinced it’s him, then realising you’ve sitting in the wrong funeral gathering altogether.
The biggest change for me when it comes to funeral services is music.
My father-in-law is 80 this year. He’s in good health overall and, despite being a widower for seven years now, he’s in doing fairly well. When lockdown came around, he was isolated for a year. He came thorough it with flying colours, so much so that we the family would joke that he had been planning for it for years. He has two freezers out his garage with enough pre-cooked food to feed the British Army.
He brews his own beverages and was quite happy discovering the joys of Netflix and other streaming services. There isn’t an old cowboy movie he hasn’t watched, and he even managed to order a tablet, download all his apps, and now gets e-books from the library on a regular basis. He has also bought a new Fender guitar and an amp and is teaching himself solos from YouTube.
Yes, he’s a planner. He boasted too that his funeral is paid for already from a local supermarket chain and it cost so much that he was able to buy a new widescreen television with the bonus points.
I remind him that the planning isn’t quite done, that he hasn’t supplied a playlist of three tunes for the service — one for when people gather, one for the middle, and one as the box passes behind the curtain to return him to dust, as we all be one day.
The reason why funeral playlists is on my mind is that there was a survey released over the past few weeks about the most popular songs played at funerals.
Stairway to Heaven by Led Zepplin was popular, so too Frank Sinatra’s My Way. Somewhere Over the Rainbow made the list, as did the Liverpool Football Club anthem, You’ll Never Walk Alone. Morning Has Broken by Cat Stevens is popular, and so too Simply the Best by Tina Turner.
My taste in music is rather eclectic so it’s difficult for me to even being about putting together a top three playlist for my exit. I don’t play to go anywhere anytime soon — but then few of us ever do, do we?
My father-in-law says he’s working on the playlist but can’t quite narrow it down. Maybe, he says, he’ll go for Stairway to Heaven but have it played back to back. It’s a seven-minute plus track. I think his funeral might run over...
Sign up for the Daily Briefing
Get the latest news and updates straight to your inbox
Network Links
GN StoreDownload our app
© Al Nisr Publishing LLC 2025. All rights reserved.