The Other Song He Sang on His Last Night on TV

Part 5 of 16 in Kim Kwang-seok: The Dead Singer K-pop Can't Let Go

No. 12, “The Day She First Cried,” is one of the two songs Kim Kwang-seok sang on his last TV appearance, the night before he died. The other was No. 1, “It’s Not Love If It Hurts Too Much,” and someone else wrote the words to both.

Kim Kwang-seok – “The Day She First Cried” (Official Audio) — 770,000 views

Its combined views come to about 13.4 million. Folk and blues guitarist Lee Jung-sun wrote the words and music, and Kim put it on his remake album Dasi Bureugi II (“Singing Again II”) in March 1995 (Melon). I left Lee Jung-sun’s own videos out of the total. I hesitated a long time before writing this one. As a fan, thinking about his last night still isn’t easy.

Jan. 5, 1996: two songs

On Jan. 5, 1996, Kim appeared with Park Hak-ki and Jang Pil-soon on Park Sang-won’s Winter Days, a show on the cable channel HBS hosted by actor Park Sang-won. The songs he sang that night were “It’s Not Love If It Hurts Too Much” and “The Day She First Cried.” Before dawn the next day he was found dead (Money S, Jan. 6, 2025; Kyunghyang Shinmun, Jan. 28, 2024).

그녀가 처음으로 울던 날 / 내 곁을 떠나갔다네

The day she cried for the first time / was the day she left me.

— Lyrics and music by Lee Jung-sun, excerpt

To him, her smile was a magnolia in full bloom, and every day beside her was spring. She was someone who smiled no matter how much it hurt. Then one day, for the first time, her face filled with tears, and it felt as if the whole world fell at once. That was the day she left. The song ends on the words that he will never see that smiling face again.

A song about a woman who always smiled and left on the day she first cried, sung on his last broadcast by a man Koreans remember through a brightly smiling funeral portrait (Part 1). It also survives from his “Super Concert” of June 1995.

Kim Kwang-seok – “The Day She First Cried” (Super Concert, June 29, 1995) — 70,000 views

Also read: The Love Song a Killer Requested on the Radio: "Gloomy Letter"

The song its writer couldn’t make a hit

This was Lee Jung-sun’s song first. Many of his songs got famous in someone else’s voice: Lee Kwang-jo’s “A Night Like Tonight,” Cho Ha-moon’s “Under the Same Sky,” and Kim’s “The Day She First Cried.” When DJ Bae Chul-soo joked, “Isn’t it because you can’t sing, hyung?” Lee answered, “Back then, when you put out an album, only the title track got any attention. Other singers sang the songs that weren’t title tracks, and that’s how people heard them” (Hankyoreh, Feb. 5, 2019).

That’s what Kim’s Dasi Bureugi albums did. “A Letter from a Private,” “Car on Two Wheels” and “The Day She First Cried” had all been released years earlier, some twenty years earlier, by Jeon In-kwon, Yang Byung-jip and Lee Jung-sun. They became hits when Kim sang them again (JoongAng Sunday, Apr. 3, 2021).

Lee Jung-sun – “The Day She First Cried” (Return of the Legend) — 290,000 views, not counted in the total

From B1A4 to Kim Jae-hwan

B1A4 sang it on an MBC music show, and Kim Jae-hwan, formerly of Wanna One, sang it on tvN Joy’s Wednesday Music Show.

B1A4 – “The Day She First Cried” (MBC) — 33,000 views

Kim Jae-hwan – “The Day She First Cried” (Wednesday Music Show, tvN Joy) — 60,000 views

Actor Jang Dong-yoon picked up a guitar and sang it on KBS’s The Seasons: Jay Park’s Drive in 2023 (150,000 views), and last year contestant No. 23 on JTBC’s Sing Again 4 choked up the judges with it (500,000 views).

Jang Dong-yoon – “The Day She First Cried” (The Seasons, KBS, 2023) — 150,000 views

Contestant No. 23 – “The Day She First Cried” (Sing Again 4, JTBC) — 500,000 views

No official recording of that last broadcast exists on any official channel. Instead, for thirty years people have put the two songs he sang that night at No. 1 and No. 12. So many people have kept the last voice he left us. I believe that is the longest goodbye those of us who love him have ever said.

Previous: Part 4 — The Song a Bandmate Gave Him on His Way Out

Next, No. 11: “A Letter from a Private,” Korea’s enlistment song, sung by a singer who lost his oldest brother in the army.

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Sources: Melon (lyrics and music by Lee Jung-sun; Kim Kwang-seok, Dasi Bureugi II, Mar. 1, 1995); Money S (Jan. 6, 2025); Kyunghyang Shinmun (Jan. 28, 2024); Hankyoreh (Feb. 5, 2019); JoongAng Sunday (Apr. 3, 2021). View counts as shown on YouTube, Oct. 25, 2026. Video of the last broadcast exists only as unofficial uploads and is not embedded.