1. Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues

Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series, Vol 1-3: Rare & Unreleased 1961-1991 (Columbia, 1991; recorded 1962);
composed by Bob Dylan

In the hallowed folk tradition, Robert Zimmerman’s oeuvre has more than its share of other people’s tunes, one being this direct lift from Woody Guthrie’s “Talking Sailor.” Not to say that it was Woody’s tune, as that was just some jaunty strumming underlying the iambic deadpan. But Woody’s not-so-reverent apprentice turned his 1944 narrative of a unionized merchant marine trucking fascist-killing ordnance over the Pacific into a post-Eisenhower parody in which an utterly oblivious picnicking enthusiast takes his wife and their “whole kids . . . yippee . . . ” on a ferry that sinks, leaving him scrambling from the Hudson an apparently shattered basket case, but ever so cheerfully “lucky to be ALIVE, though!” For a supposedly great versifier it may seem unfair to lionize Dylan for his jokes, except that – from the parking meter turned cigarette lighter to the other man’s pillbox hat fetish to “you just sit around and ask for ashtrays – can’t you reach?!?” - his jokes are even more for the ages than anything else he sent barreling down the chute. And there is no more inexhaustible comedy record by anyone than this – unless you count “Clothes Line Saga” which deftly inserted Hubert Humphrey into “Ode To Billy Joe,” where he belonged.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).