Gee, Bill - do you still boycott "Lovely Agnes"...?

I think that for me, the songs that I get tired of rapidly are the recently written ones; like top-40 tunes on the radio, folk sessions have "hits" that get done over and over when they are first written. Some that got done a lot here were the aforementioned "Rolling Mills", "Waltzing with Bears", "Lovely Agnes" and "Mary Ellen Carter". It seems that humorous songs are the ones most susceptible to abuse; there seems to be a personality division between people who enjoy hearing the same joke over and over and join in on the punch lines, and people who think something's funny one or two times, then find it tiresome.

I don't feel the same way about older written or traditional songs - there are lots of different versions around, and even the ones written in this century have gone through some winnowing so that mostly the "keepers" are what you still hear - Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, early Tom Paxton, to name a few.