Songs with the name Marie

Tommy Dorsey's "Marie," recorded with his orchestra in the late 1930s, is big-band swing at its most romantic: a smooth ballad that builds from a gentle vocal into a full orchestral sweep, with the trombone-led arrangement Dorsey was famous for. The name here is sung almost as a sigh, repeated and stretched by the reed section, so that "Marie" becomes the whole melody's center of gravity. It remains one of the most beautiful dance-band records of the swing era.

Townes Van Zandt's "Marie" is something else entirely — one of the darkest, most devastating songs he ever wrote. Over a sparse folk arrangement, it tells of a homeless man, the woman he loves, and a tragedy told with plain, unflinching words. Marie is the emotional heart of the story, a real person rather than a romantic idea, and the song's quiet brutality has made it one of the most haunting pieces in the Texas songwriter's catalogue. Randy Newman's "Marie," from his 1999 album Bad Love, is a slow New Orleans-flavored piano ballad in which a drunken, unreliable narrator tries to confess his love. The gap between the tender melody and the character's failures is classic Newman, and the name Marie carries everything he can't quite say straight.

Django Reinhardt's "Marie" is an instrumental, the guitar playing the role the singer would have held. His gypsy jazz phrasing turns the melody into something warm and conversational, with that unmistakable swinging touch — proof the name works just as well without any words at all.