"the laid-back, beer-drinking, joint-toking, beach bum persona that Buffett has assigned to the characters telling many of his songs"...

Hey. I guess I should learn some more Jimmy Buffett! Except I would quibble with the persona in one detail...it would be boat bum, not beach bum.

I used to occasionally play with an Irish-Canadian singer, somewhat older than myself, who used to be a bluegrass groupie. So she had some interesting repertoire...once while we were preparing for a gig, she tried out a song that used to be popular in her bluegrass crowd. Something about Clayton somebody's pickup truck. Clayton went off to Vietnam and left his truck up on blocks, and the narrator (his name must be Bubba) is thinking and fantasizing about how his life will be great once he figures out how to gain ownership of Clayton's truck. The funny punch line is about how he got a girl pregnant, "but that's OK cause I ran her down with Clayton's pickup truck." Clayton's truck saves the day again.

I had to observe that I didn't find that terribly amusing. She agreed, just had never thought about it before, so that was the end of that song. I had to wonder why that was supposed to be funny in the 70's...

Pete Seeger has written about how he used to sing "It's a Shame To Whip Your Wife on a Sunday" but dropped it after getting his consciousness raised. It's obviously satire but he found it didn't meet his criteria.

Some years ago I learned Martin Carthy's version of "Get Up and Bar the Door", which is of course about an old couple who are too busy giving each other the silent treatment, to prevent the invasion of their home by some robbers. At the end the auld wife is apparently raped by the robbers, causing her husband to break his silence by reprimanding them, so she cries that she won the argument "You spoke the first word, John Blunt, she cried, so go down and bar the door-oh."

I still think it's a good song, I just haven't been in a venue where I wanted to sing it it an awfully long time.

W-O