Cry

Song of the day 05/05/2022

Cry by Churchill Kohlman and Johnnie Ray

Something good to slowly swing your hips to, with a lover, or a close friend, or even, most preferably, by yourself, in a smokey room, bar, apartment, or cafe, hopefully late at night whilst having something particularly personal and gloomy to mull over. Close your eyes, allow the irrationality of nostalgia to drip into your consciousness, and enjoy the particular bliss of melancholy, what Victor Hugo deemed the happiness of being sad.

Cry was written by a man named Churchill Kohlman in the early 1950s while working at a Pittsburgh dry cleaning factory as the night watchman. It’s easy, after listening to the song, to picture this semi-tragic figure guarding button downs and dresses, sitting alone in a glass booth night after night in a permanent state of longing, repeatedly asking himself the question: How did I end up here? You may even feel sadder once made aware of how Kohlman was jipped of his royalties by a particularly malevolent music publisher.

Kohlman continued to write songs for the rest of his life, none achieving the success of Cry. He was, however, able to quit his dreary security job and become a full-time correspondent for a Chicago-based showbiz magazine. I still can’t help but think that he never spent a day in his life without roaming the streets in search of more, only to be continuously disappointed by anything and everything that came his way.

‘When waking from a bad dream don’t you sometimes think it’s real?’

Kohlman died of a heart attack in 1983 in Point Breeze, a Jewish suburb of Pittsburgh. He was survived by a wife, Viola, and their two children, Phyllis and Eleanor.

The song is most famously sung by the celebrity crooner Johnnie Ray, who brings the sorrowful, laundry-room-written lyrics to gorgeous fruition. Ray, who was arrested in 1951, before he was famous, for trying to solicit gay sex in a restroom from an undercover police officer, belts the track with all the affection, tenderness, and yes, melancholy one might have from living through a painfully regretful, subjugated existence. Until death, his catharsis would only, for the most part, be found through performance.

In 1952, Ray married Marilyn Morrison, who vowed to ‘straighten out’ his ‘unorthodox sexuality.’ They divorced in 1954. Ray was arrested again in 1959 for attempting sex with another undercover police officer in, you guessed it, the bathroom of a bar. He went to trial and was found not guilty. It was rumored that through this all he was in a covert, longterm relationship with his manager, Bill Franklin. He was also a raging alcoholic, before he quit drinking in 1960 after suffering from Tuberculosis.

If my memory serves me right, what I read once about Cry is that it was a favorite of union men everywhere from Philadelphia to Boston. They’d meet at their working men’s clubs late at night after whatever grueling shift for a beer, a slow dance, and a sing - with each other. Then, perhaps, they would proceed to go home to their wives, and with their children asleep, put the record on low, look into the heavily repressed eyes of their spouse, grab their homely hips, and find some sense of solace, moving around the living room slowly, gracefully, perhaps even bumping into a bar cart by mistake. It’s not impossible. 

The song was, funnily, a Mafia favorite.