For some reason Mog eats the end of my post so it is now in two parts. Part One Lives Here
From wikipedia:"In her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe includes an extra, final verse which may have been taken from another hymn. The additional verse is part of most hymnals today.
When we’ve been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun, We've no less days to sing God’s praise Than when we’ve first begun.
Whereas the original lyrics were penned by John Newton in 1772 (stanzas 1-6), this additional verse (stanza 7) was written in the nineteenth century, and is credited by some to John P. Rees (1828-1900)[4]. This verse became firmly established as part of the hymn by its addition in popular hymnbooks of the early twentieth century.
3. "Maggie's Farm" - Bob Dylan
image source - http://www.bobdylanroots.com/down.html
Next to Dylan's "Royal Albert Hall" performance, Dylan going Electric at The Newport Festival in 1965, has to be one of the single most iconoclastic moments in pop culture (even if recounts are often more profound then it was actually experienced.) In the book ??Behind The Shades: Revisited" by Clinton Heylin, Johnny Taplin is quoted as saying that Dylan "seemed to be crying" (213) after the performance, even though people like Joe Boyd got it, and were "lapping it up"(211). But the act of playing "Maggie's Farm" electric, with a rock band, at a folk festival, was a sign of protest in itself, lending to the ever deepening history of music evolving.
From Wikipedia -"Maggie's Farm" is Dylan's declaration of independence from the protest folk movement. Punning on Silas McGee's Farm, where he had performed "Only a Pawn in Their Game" at a civil rights protest in 1963 (featured in the film Don't Look Back), Maggie's Farm recasts Dylan as the pawn and the folk music scene as the oppressor. Rejecting the expectations of that scene as he turns towards loud rock n' roll, self-exploration, and surrealism, Dylan intones: "They say sing while you slave / I just get bored."
a YouTube video of that performance:
"Dylan biographer Robert Shelton traces the origins of his 1961 song "Hard Times in the Country" to "Penny's Farm," a 1920s musical complaint about a rural landlord; it is also similar to Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett's 1934 song "Tanner's Farm."' - William Ruhlmann All Music Guide.
A link to "Down on Penny's Farm" performed by Charlie Parr at The Internet Archive.
This behavior doesn't always apply to just music, though. Even the visual arts have their progenitors of re contextualization such as Joseph Cornell. Cornell seemed just as comfortable re-appropriating dime store tchotchkies and print matter into mystical little worlds or spiritual shrines of his own devising. Cornell even had a correspondence of cultural mashing with one of the first modern artists to turn art on it's head - Marcel Duchamp(more here). When one views the work created between the two in correspondence, assisting Duchamp with his _Dossier_ project, it is clear that even Cornell was helping Duchamp to re-contextualize and re-invent himself once more.
image source
So what is this need, this compulsion for us to take, riff, expand upon, collapse, rearrange, deconstruct, reconstruct, and recompose something we enjoy so much.
Since I was a kid, I love to flip the lyrics of a popular song to fit a situation, no matter how silly. It's a sort of mental free form improv gymnastics for me. I like seeing if I can fit my thoughts within the context of the "original". "Stop Your Sobbing" is sung to my daughter with the lyrics "There's one thing that you gotta do, To make me still want you" is replaced with "If there is one thing I cannot do, it is to nurse you."
And who didn't attempt this in the most juvenile ways on the playground as a kid. As a kid songs like "Every Breath You Take" could easily be reconstructed into an ode to a bizarre bathroom experience that would have us in stitches. When in doubt Pop Culture will always thrive on the double entendre or a poop joke or two. Even as children we see the benefit of building something off the work of others.
As beings that posses a strange trait called creativity, our human experience in every form is the reference. Making the profound more personal is the name of the game with humans. Or like Bob Dylan proclaimed in that ground breaking album, maybe it's all just about "Bringing It All Back Home"