Written by Hungarian composer Rezső Seress, with lyrics by his friend and poet László Jávor, in 1933, the first American recording of “Gloomy Sunday” –“Szomorú Vasárnap” in Hungarian—was rushed onto the market just three short years later in a recording by Hal Kemp and His Orchestra. Released by the Brunswick Record Corp., the album was sold with a distinctly bleak publicity campaign that dubbed it: “The Famous Hungarian Suicide Song.” 

“Pennies From Heaven” it wasn’t. 

Time Magazine, writing in March 1936 upon the release of the first American recordings of the song, noted that Budapest police, while investigating the suicide of shoemaker Joseph Keller, who had left a suicide note which contained quoted passages of “Gloomy Sunday,” were able to string together 17 other suicides related to the song: “Two shot their brains out while hearing a gypsy band play the piece, others killed themselves listening to recorded versions, several leaped into the Danube clutching the sheet music.” In a glowing grasp of the obvious Time put their short piece on the song to rest by noting that “(f)ew who listened to the Kemp recording for Brunswick or Paul Whiteman's for Victor or Henry King's for Decca failed to confess that the melody and lyrics had a profoundly depressing effect.” 

This unfortunate string of suicides reportedly lead the Hungarian police to ban the song—though there is scant evidence to suggest this actually occurred—but if it did it would be only the first time the song would be banned as it faced similar restrictions on the BBC and, briefly, on American radio.

The next month Time ran a follow-up letter written from Seress to his American record company, the composer haunted by what he referred to as his “fatal fame” wrote, “I stand in the midst of this deathly success as an accused.” Seress himself would eventually commit suicide in 1968, choking himself to death with wire while recuperating in a hospital from wounds he received after jumping out of a window, but there’s no indication that his most famous song was a contributing factor other than his distress over never having written anything else as popular.

The Hungarian origins of the “Gloomy Sunday” myth aren’t surprising even if they are difficult or impossible to verify. Hungary is notorious for having one of the highest suicide rates in the world: according to OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) statistics released in December 2009, 21 out of every 100,000 people ended their own lives in Hungary during 2006, placing the small, Eastern European nation second only to South Korea, which had the highest rate at 21.5/100,000. And it should be noted that 21 suicides per 100,000 is a significant improvement over numbers that placed the country’s suicide rate as high as 48 per 100,000 during the late 1980s. (For comparison, the 2006 OECD suicide statistics for the United States and the United Kingdom are significantly lower at respectively 10.1 and 6.1 per 100,000.)

There are two English versions of “Gloomy Sunday” that warrant record. The first translation is by Desmond Carter, which can be found on the early recordings by Hal Kemp, Paul Whiteman, Artie Shaw (and their orchestras), and Paul Robeson (who sounds a bit like he’s testing for a Dracula musical). Carter’s interpretation of the song is too plainly straightforward and touches neither the apocalyptic grandeur of the Hungarian original nor the poetic darkness of the dominant English translation by singer and lyricist Sam Lewis—also paradoxically responsible for the lyrics to “I’m Sitting On Top of the World”—which veers dramatically from the original in style, if not theme: The Lewis version introduces an entirely new third verse, which, though melodically fantastic, follows in the unfortunate American showbiz tradition of hackneyed plot twists in the service to happy endings, placing the troubling original verses in the relative safety of a dream (“Dreaming… I was only dreaming…”).

In 1941 Billie Holiday, already a star, was just entering the melancholy realism phase of her career ushered in by songs like “Long Gone Blues,” “God Bless the Child,” and, most notably, the dramatic and dark “Strange Fruit.” When Holiday took up the Lewis version of “Gloomy Sunday” and recorded it with Ted Allen and his Orchestra, it, like many songs Lady Day encountered before and after, became her own and in 1952 Holiday cited the song alongside “No More” and “Fine and Mellow” as her three favorite personal recordings—though in a remembrance of the singer, comedian James “Stump” Cross recalled that the singer “got tired of it; it was so real to her that as she sang it she would see it and it would get to her,” adding, “(w)ith her vivid imagination, when she sings a song like that, the tears come down.”

The song provided the inspiration for the 1999 Hungarian film Gloomy Sunday (Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod), which fictionalizes its genesis within a love triangle, and its legend is also at the heart of the 2006 conspiracy film, The Kovak Box, which stars Timothy Hutton as a science fiction writer lured to a conference on the island of Mallorca only to find that a series of unexplained suicides are mysteriously connected to Billie Holiday’s recording. 

No one would argue that Holiday’s performance is the most popular version of the song, but it sways with a gentility that belies its tragic nature and the use of Lewis’s hopeful third verse taints the song’s essential morbidity with the kind of lost-in-translation, gee-whiz American optimism that dilutes many European works one their journey across the Atlantic.

Though many artists have recorded the song there are three versions following Holiday’s take worth paying particular attention to. Ray Charles recorded one of the finest for his 1969 album, I’m All Yours, Baby!, interestingly opening with the gentle sway of Lewis’s daydream finale before the skies darken and the traditional slow-turning verses appear while the bottom drops out for the two-word chorus. Two other remarkable versions worthy of attention present the song in its most elegiac and purely miserable form: Lewis’ lyric without the hokum third verse. The first is from soul singer Ketty Lester whose 1962 version crosses Holiday’s rendition with the breathy melancholy of Julie London’s “Cry Me a River.” More recently Icelandic curio Björk, dressed in a pair of wooden angel wings and a feral, over-feathered skirt, performed the song with doomful organ accompaniment at the funeral service for fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who took his life on February 11, 2010. That version can be found all over the Internet, but Bjork’s only official live version, featuring the Lewis lyric and cheat verse, was recorded in 1998 for an AT&T promotional release that pulled double-duty as a fundraiser for the Walden Woods Projects and featured full orchestral backing. It’s fantastic and her other-worldly voice and over-enunciated English, along with the noir orchestral setting, make for a gauzy and haunting rendition, but it falls short of the moodiness captured in her performance at McQueen’s service.