From Pain to Power: 3 Musicians Who Turned Their Tragedies Into Art

To be human is to experience both tragedy and joy, and famous musicians aren’t exempt from that fact of life. These three musicians, however, experienced heartwrenching personal tragedies that could have easily ended their careers. Instead, they pushed forward; and it’s inspiring that they did. Let’s look at three famous musicians who turned their tragedies into art!

1. Jackson C. Frank

Backstories don’t get rougher than Jackson C. Frank’s backstory. Frank’s life was full of terrible circumstances that would be enough to make any man give up. Thankfully, this folk icon turned his pain into power through music. 

Frank’s high school caught fire when he was just a child, claiming the lives of 15 of his friends, including his girlfriend Marlene. He survived the ordeal with scars, but the emotional scarring would last a lifetime. Years later, after marrying and having children, his son would die as an infant, resulting in the failure of his marriage. Frank had to be institutionalized, ended up more or less homeless in the years after, and was shot in the eye in New York at some point. All the while, Frank made incredible music and really deserved so much better.

2. Nick Cave

Musicians often have personal tragedies that make their way into songs, and Australian artist Nick Cave turned his own tragedy into wisdom. Two of Cave’s sons passed away from different circumstances, which would be enough to drag any other musician down. Rather than let it consume him, Cave made music and offered words of wisdom.

“Creative people in general have an acute propensity for wonder,” said Cave in his newsletter. “Great trauma can rob us of this, the ability to be awed by things. Everything loses its sheen and appears beyond our reach. […] So how do we return to our lives, to the awe of existence, and reclaim a sense of wonder? Well, for me, it had something to do with work but it also had something to do with community. […] I kind of realized that work was the key to get back to my life, but I also realized that I was not alone in my grief and that many of you were, in one way or another, suffering your own sorrows, your own griefs.”

3. Ian Dury

Ian Dury was a punk rock icon. He was also a man with a lot of trauma in his history. As a child, Dury had to spend weeks in a full-body cast after contracting polio in the late 1940s. He more or less lived in a hospital for over a year.

From there, he left his school for disabled children and went to art college, where he was admonished by his own professor and called a “lunatic” for being disabled. He took that hardship and produced some incredible music, evident in the line “It’s nice to be a lunatic” in the song “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” from 1979.

Photo by Steve Morley/Redferns

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