The cutesy novelty stuff is fine, but there are SO many more interesting things to listen to for Halloween than the frickin' stale "Monster Mash." Country and folk music have particularly rich veins of creepy and cool death songs to set a suitably macabre mood.

For this country death mix, I'm looking for things that are creepy or maudlin, or hopefully some of both. I've purposely left out murder songs, as I'm thinking up a whole separate list of country murder stuff. Can't get enough of that.

I'm also discounting some really good death themed songs that just don't have the right creepy emotional energy. For example, Tom T Hall's "Ballad of Forty Dollars" is a particularly great song set at a funeral, but there's nothing at all creepy or maudlin about it.

For starters, you can't get much creepier or more maudlin than singing about dead children. We'll start this mess with "Jeannie's Afraid of the Dark." This song particularly worked on my pre-adolescent mind, watching Porter and Dolly sing this on his tv show 30 odd years ago. I suspect I'm missing some personal tragedy story, cause Dolly's got quite a bunch of songs about dead children. This was her best known, but even creepier was her solo song "Me and Little Andy" in which the Lord takes the girl and her little dog, too.

Less known, but freakier than any dead child o' Dolly's, the usually rather comedic Little Jimmy Dickens had "Raggedy Ann," which the narrator is addressing to his dead daughter's dolly laid on her grave. This song messed me up enough to have to write a whole separate story. CLICK HERE for it. This thing takes the cake, and the critical closing position in this deathly menagerie.

But back to Porter Wagoner. For being the tv star with the corny jokes and the cheesy nudie suits, this guy has some really dark material in his catalogue. He turns out to be the star of this collection. Especially, he worked on my little mind with the secret confessional shame understatedly expressed in his classic tale of "The Carroll County Accident." Lots of people do "The Green Green Grass of Home," but his is the version that most sticks with me. Also in death themes, he'll figure big in the country murder material.

Sticking with the traffic wreck theme, the most purely existentially terrifying track in this set comes from Roy Acuff. You can just about smell that "Wreck on the Highway" with the whiskey and blood and the broken glass all run together.

"Phantom 309" could be seen as cheesy, I suppose, but this classic Red Sovine hit strikes me personally as more of a cool ghost story. It's not really scary at all, but it's not really meant to be frightening. It's not like Big Joe was going to jump out and GET ya.