What songs contain the names of actual people . . . not merely a first name, even if we know who the person is. The one I’m thinking of is Simon & Garfunkel’s *A Simple Desultory Philippic, *which mentions:
Norman Mailer
Maxwell Taylor
John O’Hara
Robert McNamara
Ayn Rand
Phil Spector
Lou Adler
Barry Sadler
Lenny Bruce
Dylan Thomas
Mick Jagger
Andy Warhol
Roy Hale
Art Garfunkel
Leonard Bernstein!
Marilyn Monroe in We Didn’t Start The Fire By Billy Jor-El.
Brendan Behan is mentioned in Streams Of Whiskey by The Pogues.
Simon & Garfunkel are amateurs compared to Billy Joel.
To list all the people in that song would be a violation of the SDMB rules aabout quoting lyrics.
Joe DiMaggio
I meant to come back and add that in It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine), R.E.M. also name checks Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce, and Lester Bangs.
At writing long lists of stuff, anyway. Not so much at songwriting.
Excuse me? Joel got the long lists to rhyme and match the music. You try it with historical people and events since the song was written.
Gertrude Stein in Roseability by Idlewild
Jean-Paul Belmondo, Mary Quant, and [Allen] Ginsberg in Donovan’s “Sunny South Kensington.”
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I think Paul Simon is a better songwriter than Billy Joel, and I’m not impressed by the fact that We Didn’t Start the Fire rhymes. That being said, I’d rather we stick to the OP asked for and not turn this into an argument.
nm
Does last name only count?
*“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio.” –Neil Young
*Note: I do not need Neil Young around, anyhow, and I won’t forgive him for “Southern Man” even if Ronnie and the boys did…but his song might qualify for this thread.
Jill Sobule’s song Heroes has a lot of name check:
William Faulker
Dorothy Parker
Paul McCartney (…jealous of John, even more so now that he’s gone)
Dylan
Donovan
Pablo Picasso
Orson Welles
Babe Ruth
Lewis Carroll (…I’m sure did Alice)
Plato
TS Elliot
FDR
Raymond Chandler
Tennessee Williams
Really, she might be the best folky style songwriter around right now.
Also, Lenny Bruce (again), Leonid Breznev, and Lester Bangs.
Give Peace a Chance mentions Timothy Leary, Tommy Smothers, Tommy Cooper, Bob Dylan, Derek Taylor, Norman Mailer, and Allan Ginsberg. (Also John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Rosemary Leary, but they’re all first name only.)
Don’t forget the earlier version of the song (realeased on the Paul Simon Songbook in '65.) which also included:
Lyndon Johnson (At least in the spoken subtitle)
Jack Kerouac (last name only)
John Birch
Walt Disney
Diz Disley
John Lennon
Krishna Menon
Walter Brennan
Cassius Clay
James Joyce
Tom Wilson and Barry Kornfeld, (Wislon Produced Sounds of Silence, and Kornfeld played gituar on Wednesday Morning 3 AM.)
You can hear this version here.
Bette Davis Eyes.
James Dean – the Eagles
Steve McQueen – Sheryl Crow
Mojo Nixon’s Elvis is Ecerywhere. Also mentions that anti-Elvis Michael J Fox
Before it was a boat, Edmund Fitzgerald was a person.