Sing Me To Sleep
Sep 20th, 2008 by oldfogey
I heard this song when I was young, on an old 78rpm record. It haunted me for years. Yet it’s just a sentimental song from the early years of the twentieth century. The singer begs a loved one (we don’t know if it is lover, mother, friend) to sing her to sleep so that she can be at rest from the cares of the day. The singer is passive, almost helpless, at the end of her tether. Sleep is anaesthetic. Her love is for those who can give her the rest she craves - only “God and you” are true. At first hearing I find the song charming, but after more hearings I begin to find it strange and disturbing.
In Robert Guediguian’s film, La Ville est Tranquille (2001), about the urban underclass in Marseilles, a young woman lives with her mother and small baby in a flat in a down at heel part of town. She is a drug addict. Her mother works in a fish cannery to support herself and the child and her daughter’s heroin habit. The mother finds it increasingly hard to get enough money to buy drugs, and her daughter becomes restless, anguished and vicious. Finally after months of struggling with her daughter’s demands, she reaches the end of her tether. She prostitutes herself to get enough money and returns to the flat with heroin. The daughter’s look, when she realises what her mother has brought, is one of radiant love, as she anticipates the drugged bliss of the sleep to come. Her mother gives her an overdose and the sleep in permanent.
The singer is Essie Ackland.
| Rate it: |
 Email it
|
      |
|
