Memorial Slideshow Songs: How to Choose Music That Fits the Photos

A memorial slideshow is only ever half pictures. The other half is whatever is playing underneath them — and most people can tell you, years later, exactly what song was playing when their mother's wedding photo came up on the screen.

That is a lot of weight for one choice to carry, and it often lands on whoever happens to be handy with a computer. If that is you, this is meant to make it easier. Below are songs families genuinely choose, grouped by the kind of life you are remembering, followed by some practical things that are easy to overlook until the room has gone quiet and the first photo is already on the screen.

Start with the length, not the song

It helps to know your runtime before you fall in love with a track. Most memorial slideshows land somewhere between three and eight minutes, which is one to three songs. Photos usually sit on screen for five to seven seconds — long enough to recognize a face, short enough that nobody is waiting.

So: count your photos, multiply by six seconds, and you have a rough runtime. Forty photos is about four minutes. That number tells you whether you are choosing one song or three, which is a much smaller decision than choosing from all the music ever recorded.

If you are using more than one, a gentle order works well — something quiet for the early years, something warmer in the middle, something with a little lift at the end. The slideshow does not have to end in tears. Many of the best ones do not.

Gentle songs that suit almost any life

These are the ones that show up again and again, in every kind of service, for every kind of person. There is a reason for that. They are unhurried, they leave room for the pictures, and almost nobody finds them jarring.

• "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" — Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
• "What a Wonderful World" — Louis Armstrong
• "Hallelujah" — Jeff Buckley, or Leonard Cohen's original
• "Fields of Gold" — Eva Cassidy
• "In My Life" — The Beatles
• "Landslide" — Fleetwood Mac
• "The Luckiest" — Ben Folds
• "Time to Say Goodbye" — Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman
• "Fire and Rain" — James Taylor

For a parent or grandparent

When the slideshow spans seventy or ninety years, the music often works best if it reaches back too — something they would have recognized, or something that names the relationship plainly.

• "Dance With My Father" — Luther Vandross
• "A Song for Mama" — Boyz II Men
• "Forever Young" — Bob Dylan, or Rod Stewart's version
• "The Living Years" — Mike + The Mechanics
• "Wind Beneath My Wings" — Bette Midler
• "The House That Built Me" — Miranda Lambert
• "Unforgettable" — Nat King Cole
• "My Wish" — Rascal Flatts

Songs of faith

For a service held in a church, or for a family whose faith was simply part of how they lived, a hymn under the photographs can feel less like a soundtrack and more like a continuation of the service itself.

• "Amazing Grace" — a solo voice or bagpipes both work
• "It Is Well With My Soul"
• "How Great Thou Art"
• "I Can Only Imagine" — MercyMe
• "Great Is Thy Faithfulness"
• "Blessings" — Laura Story
• "I'll Fly Away" — especially in a bluegrass arrangement

Country and Americana

For someone whose truck radio was never off country, or whose life was lived mostly outdoors and mostly at home, these tend to fit better than anything more polished.

• "Go Rest High on That Mountain" — Vince Gill
• "When I Get Where I'm Going" — Brad Paisley and Dolly Parton
• "Humble and Kind" — Tim McGraw
• "Angels Among Us" — Alabama
• "Simple Man" — Lynyrd Skynyrd
• "If Heaven Wasn't So Far Away" — Justin Moore

When the person you lost was young

A slideshow for someone in their twenties or thirties is a different room — more friends, more phone photos, more laughing in the pictures. The music usually needs to match that, and older hymns can feel borrowed.

• "See You Again" — Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth
• "Supermarket Flowers" — Ed Sheeran
• "The Night We Met" — Lord Huron
• "Rivers and Roads" — The Head and the Heart
• "I'll Be Missing You" — Puff Daddy and Faith Evans
• "Photograph" — Ed Sheeran
• "Ripple" — Grateful Dead

Instrumental music, when words would get in the way

Sometimes lyrics compete with the photographs — two things asking to be read at once. If the slideshow is long, or if the images are doing a lot of work on their own, instrumental music gives people somewhere quiet to put their attention.

• "Clair de Lune" — Debussy
• "Gymnopédie No. 1" — Erik Satie
• "Nuvole Bianche" — Ludovico Einaudi
• "River Flows in You" — Yiruma
• "Cavatina" — Stanley Myers, often on classical guitar
• "Jupiter" (the Thaxted theme) — Gustav Holst

A few practical things worth checking

Read the lyrics all the way to the end. Plenty of songs that open beautifully take a turn in the third verse. Sit with the whole thing once, out loud, before you commit.

Match the tempo to how fast the photos move. A song with a driving beat under slow-dissolving photos feels restless. A very slow song under quick transitions feels like two different events happening at once.

Do not let the music get cut off mid-chorus. Fade out deliberately, or trim the song so it resolves. An abrupt stop is the thing people notice.

Test it where it will actually play. Funeral home speakers, a church sound system, and a laptop are three very different things. Ask to run it once in the room, at volume, before the service. Bring the file on a drive as well as in the cloud.

Think ahead about posting it online. If you plan to upload the slideshow to Facebook or YouTube afterward, commercially released music can get the video muted or blocked. It is worth knowing that before the day rather than after.

When none of these is quite right

Sometimes you go through every list like this one and nothing fits — because the song you are looking for would have to be about a specific person, and no one has written it.

That is the gap a custom memorial song fills. At Their Life Song, families share the details that made someone who they were — the phrases they used, the work they did, the way they answered the phone — and receive an original song written around that life. Some families play it under the slideshow. Others save it for afterward, for the drive home or the first anniversary. There is no wrong way to use it.

Whatever you choose, the song does not have to be perfect. It has to be true to them, and recognizable to the people in the room. That is a much lower bar than it feels like at two in the morning with a folder of photographs open in front of you — and you will almost certainly clear it.

Related reading

• Memorial Slideshow Ideas: Photos That Tell Their Story
• How to Choose Music for a Funeral or Memorial Service
• Custom Memorial Songs: The Complete Guide