“What a Way to Go,” also titled “If Loving You Is Killing Me,” was written by Jimmy Martin, the bluegrass singer known as the King of Bluegrass. He recorded it with his Sunny Mountain Boys.
The song turns heartbreak into dark comedy. The singer admits that loving this woman is destroying him — that the love is, in effect, killing him — and yet decides that if he has to go, this is what a way to go. Pain and pleasure are tangled past separating.
The song fit Martin’s hard-driving style and his sharp sense of a good line.
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