In the late 1950s-early 1960s there was a brief trend in American pop music called "death discs": songs about teenagers dying tragic untimely deaths. A lot of these songs were banned from playing on the radio yet still managed to do well on the charts. This article discusses the trend in great detail, going over the plot of each song and the artists who recorded them. The trend eventually ended with the arrival of the Beatles and the British Invasion, leaving this as a weird mostly-forgotten blip in the history of popular music.

This trend is also apparently the origin of the song "Death Cab For Cutie" after which the band is named (which is how I found this article) -- apparently, the song was written as a parody of all these songs that were coming out at the time.