old songs

wen's wondering if a bookmobile would play a tune like Mr Whippy led boynton to some general googling with nothing much to show for it. But strangely it did lead to this Guardian article on Richard Thompson's My favourite songs of the past 1,000 years
During the last quarter of 1999, I was asked, along with many other folk from the music world, to send Playboy magazine a list of what I thought were the 10 greatest songs of the millennium. Such pretension, I thought. They don't mean millennium, do they? Probably about 30 years is the cut-off: Tears for Fears might sneak in, Cole Porter probably not.

Pretension or dumbness, but the syndrome that makes a big picture out of 30 years, prevalent at pub trivia nights, is what prompted boynton to look elsewhere in November
Feel a bit remiss now that I didn't even consider Sumer is a cumen in

As for the big picture of the bigger picture, Thompson concludes:
Thinking about all these songs has led me to wonder: has anything changed in 1,000 years? Probably not. The themes seem fairly consistent throughout - boy meets girl, girl meets boy, boy loses girl, girl loses boy, boy repines, girl repines, boy dies, girl dies. At the early end of things, what survives of the secular is mostly moralising: