Heroic Sacrifice/Music

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Heroic Sacrifices in Music include:

  • The old-style country song "Big John", based on a real story, about a large mine worker who was generally known as a brute due to his sheer size and strength. However, when the mine began collapsing, he used brute strength to hold up the collapsing beams long enough for his fellow workers to escape the mine, staying behind to hold it up long enough for them all to get out safely. The mine then collapsed completely with him still trapped inside, filling with poison gas, "And they all knew it was the end of the line for Big John."
  • Another old country song, also based on a true story, about a truck driver on a narrow road only wide enough for one vehicle, the edge of which opened over a huge fall (a mountainside or cliff or chasm, I can't remember which) and coming from the opposite direction as him was a schoolbus full of children. Rather than hit the bus and most likely killing the children inside, he deliberately drove his rig over the edge of the cliff and plunged to his death, saving the lives of the children at the cost of his own.
  • "Soldier", a song by Harvey Andrews, an english poet and songwriter. It starts telling the story of a guy who joined the British Army, because work was hard to find and, besides, there were no wars right away, and (lucky man) found himself in the middle of the British-Irish urban guerilla. The song actually reaches its climax when the guy, who was running a boring patrol tour in a train station, jumps over a bomb just thrown by IRA guerilla fighters, thus dooming himself and saving the lives of the people around him, for whom he nurtured no enmity and who had treated him with cold hatred just seconds before. Inspired by real life example of Sergeant Michael Willetts, thank you other wiki. Damn, he surely must have had some massive balls of steel. This troper definitively thinks that guy should be warranted the rank of Badass, he just can't decides which one.
  • Way, way too many Israeli songs to count.
  • Mentioned in the song "Your Guardian Angel" by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus.

"I'll be there for you through it all / Even if saving you sends me to Heaven"