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The saddest songs in popular music are often about death, the disintegration of relationships -often times through infidelity- unrequited love or even loneliness.

Sometimes those songs, and the sadness they evoke, result from the perfect blend of lyrics and music but some songs without lyrics can evoke deep sadness as well.

It is possible that the sadness that one gets from listening to Ennio Morricone's lyric-less "The Death of a Soldier" from the film, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, comes from the blood and gore and death depicted in that particular scene when one of the army's leaders calls for more emotion from the musicians: "More feeling!"

You see the tears streaming from the face of one of the musicians. Whenever I hear the song, my mind is transported immediately to that scene.

It is not surprising that death features in many of the saddest songs. Who can forget Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven" a song that encapsulates Clapton's pain from the death of his four-year-old son Conor. The listener can relate to the song on a visceral level. This is clearly a tearjerker since the listener will associate his or her own loss with the song when he or she hears it.

The Beatles Eleanor Rigby is about death but also about loneliness as well:

"Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came"

Jewish poet Lewis Allen, writing under the pseudonym Abel Meeropol, wrote the controversial poem "Strange Fruit," which became a controversial song mostly identified with jazz singer Billie Holiday.

It is a song about racism and the lynching of African-Americans primarily in -but not limited to- the South in the United States. Holiday's version of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978. The words, and in the Holiday version, the music, still retain the ability to evoke profound sadness and tears:

"Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees."

Even when the singer's songs aren't themselves associated with death, their eventual passing, especially if under tragic circumstances, often imbue their songs with a deathly pallor:

Shortly before his tragic passing, in response to Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind," Sam Cooke wrote "A Change Is Gonna Come,"

"It's been too hard living, but I'm afraid to die."

Donny Hathaway's version of Leon Russell's "A Song For You" foreshadows his later death:

"I love you in a place where there's

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