Having resumed playing fairly recently after a long layoff, my repertoire, such as it is, *is* in a time warp. My relatively brief career as a full-time busker dates back to the early 70s, and I still play pretty much the same stuff as then (which includes numbers I had begun learning in '63).

A good number of the songs I do have never been widely known outside the hardcore folk-and-blues community, so casual listeners don't always *know* how dated they are. In fact, people have often assumed I had written some of the songs myself. (Although I once aspired to become a songwriter, I've never written *anything* ~ nothing I ever judged to be worth completing, let alone performing.)

I had been wondering which "Candy Man" had been under discussion as being an example of the kind of tired and hackneyed song that prompted this thread. To my mind, John Hurt's CM is not a "version" but an entirely different song than anyone else's.

For that matter, so is Sammy Davis Jr.'s...