One related thought...

I have, I'm sure we all have, felt the sag in spirits when the clamor arises for some song everybody dotes on and it's pretty unworthy. Especially if it's off my personal song map.

I used to hate people saying "Sing Tell Me Why" (as in "the ivy twines"). Of course the perverse comeback is to sing the Stoneman Family version of "Spanish Merchant's Daughter" (Oh No John variant), which starts with the same three li'l wordz.

It can be unbearable, as noted above, when "Tom Dooley" is all the rage, to be asked to sing that. Ugh ugh ugh, drags me down just to think of it. I love Tom Dooley, without the cutesies...I sing it in the Grayson and Whitter version. But to be asked to blat out what everyone else is blatting out at this very moment is just degrading to any singer.

Maybe that's why it's so great that folk just now is the farthest thing from pop exposure, and the better for it.

That is nothing, though, against the song. "Tom Dooley" survived the Kingston Trio, and "The Fox" will survive Nickel Creek, and so on and on.

So maybe the real question isn't necessarily "Songs we're too cool to sing," but "How to elude getting trapped in a song craze while it's going on, so you can survive to sing the very same song in a new context after the hoopla dies down."

Um...having said all those brave words in previous messages, I gotta admit "Scarlet Ribbons" makes me ill. But that may be because a college roomie played it to death and I couldn't get away from it. (In other words, it's tied to a bad experience, to quote a comment above.)

La la la la.

Bob