Popular music was part of the fabric of teenage life during the 1960s, when I did my time in middle and high school. The music of that time was ground-breaking and persists even today. I find that listening to "the oldies" really takes me back to a time I remember as exciting, and romantic, yet filled with teenage angst. Being hooked on the stuff, I found that popular music continued to color my life in college and as I grew to adulthood, married, and had children. Now, even those "newer" oldies bring back memories for me. But I've discovered that, in the context of life in the 21st century, the lyrics to some of the old favorites are actually pretty horrifying.

Aside from the obviously sappy love songs ("When I Fall in Love," The Lettermen); the just-plain-silly songs ("Do-Wacka-Do," Roger Miller); the beach-party/surfin' songs (almost anything by the Beach Boys); and the romantic ballads ("The Last Waltz," Engelbert Humperdinck), themes common in songs from the '60s include teenage suicide, premature death in violent car crashes, runaways, and stalking. In the '70s and '80s themes included murder, cop-killing, robbery, stabbings, and threats of intimate partner abuse.

Huh? Really? Yep—believe it or not.

In the early '60s, singer Dickey Lee popularized "tragedy songs." Consider "Patches," about teenage suicide (boy forbidden to see girl from wrong side of the tracks; she kills herself; he plans to). Jody Reynolds' "Endless Sleep" ends happily—sort of. Boy and girl fight; girl runs off to drown herself; boy goes after her and pulls her from the sea—just in the nick of time.

In the late 1960s, Bobbie Gentry's Gothic "Ode to Billy Joe" rocketed to the top of the charts in the U.S. and was an international best-seller. In this first-person narrative, we find out that Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge. The song opens a lot of unanswered questions, one of them being that the female narrator and Billy Joe were seen "throwing something" off the same bridge. Was that why he jumped? We don't know, but long after Billy's death, the narrator spends "a lot of time picking flowers up on Choctaw Ridge," and drops them "into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge."

Tragic car crashes seemed to be a popular theme in the '60s. Lee's "Tell Laura I Love Her" was about a race-car-driving teen trying to win prize money for an engagement ring, and, you guessed it—he dies in the ensuing crash. Dion and the Belmonts did "Our Last Kiss," a song that's actually been redone by more contemporary artists, such as Pearl Jam. This one memorializes a car wreck in which girlfriend dies, boyfriend survives, but longs for the day when he can join his baby when he leaves this world. The then-popular "Teen Angel" by Mark Dinning tells the story of teenage sweethearts in a car stalled on the railroad tracks—of course, with a train bearing down on them. He pulled her out and she was safe, but she went running back. Why? Emergency responders who pulled her body out of the wreck found his high school ring "clutched in her fingers tight."

Troubled teens in the '60s could identify with "Runaway," by Del Shannon. (Girl runs away, apparently after break-up with boy); and girls longing for love really connected with Little Peggy March's "I Will Follow Him"—a clear stalker song. ("I will follow him, follow him wherever he may go….")

In the mid-'60s, the Bobby Fuller Four hit it big with "I Fought the Law," about a young man who spends time robbing people with a six-gun and is sentenced to hard labor, where he breaks rocks in the hot sun, while missing his baby. In the 1980s, Eric Clapton popularized Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff," about a man wrongly accused of killing a deputy. Not so, he says in the song—it was the sheriff he killed.

Popular songs turned more disturbing as we moved into the 1970s; in particular, I am reminded of the Beatles tune, whose lyrics say, "I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man…"

Barry Manilow put a bloody gunfight over a girl to a catchy tune in his 1970s "Copacabana," a New York nightclub that was the "hottest spot north of Havana." The narrator in Tom Jones' 1970s hit "Delilah" does in his cheating sweetheart with a knife. ("She stood there laughing…I felt the knife in my hand, and she laughed no more.)

I could go on, but it actually gets depressing to find that so many of the tunes that my generation listened to and loved had violent themes about things that society is battling today.

Sometimes I just long for the simplicity of the 1960s ballads of The Lettermen. Of course, one of their most popular ballads was a remake of the 1950s Vogue hit, "Turn Around, Look at Me." The lyrics start, "There is someone walking behind you, turn around, look at me..."

Yes, another stalker song.