The OP didn’t mean THAT KIND of “happy ending”!
Chapin wrote a lot of possibly-happy ending songs, didn’t he? More than I expected, considering Taxi and WOL*D and Cats In The Cradle are pretty depressing.
Another Johnny Cash (although he didn’t write it) story song with a happy ending is Ballad of a Teenage Queen.
Small town girl loves the boy next door who works at the candy store, a movie scout spots her, she goes to Hollywood and gets famous, but she gives it up and comes back to the small town boy.
Then He Kissed Me. Meet, date, get married, happily ever after.
Fancy, by Bobbie Gentry (and later by Reba McEntire)… starts with a girl being so poor that she has to be sold into prostitution as a teen just to feed the family, ends up classy, very well-off, etc.
I hate follow mention of Johnny Cash with Sk8r Boi, but it maybe counts.
In 1958, Jody Reynolds saved his girlfriend from the clutches of “Endless Sleep”.
In 1964, Chuck Berry passed through Raleigh, North Carolina and continued until he arrived in the “Promised Land” (aka California). In contrast, 49 years later, Darius Rucker was wending his way back to Raleigh in “Wagon Wheel”.
So there were two good ol’ boys of the never meanin’ no harm variety who, sure, have been in trouble with the law; and, granted, might come to a bad end someday; but last I heard, they were still makin’ their way the only way they know how…
C.W. McCall’s Convoy
–They finally get themselves a ‘mighty’ convoy
–They beat the cops along the way and successfully make it to Jersey (no '70s Jersey jokes, please) in a rather upbeat and cheerful mood.
–Then, that goal (such as it is) accomplished, the truckers head back to their real destinations, with pretty much a “Well, keep in touch” farewell.
Sadly, the fate of Pig Pen and whether he got his trailer full of hogs to Omaha remains unresolved, though…
Not to mention Sugarloaf, with DON’T CALL US - WE’LL CALL YOU: “Listen kid, you paid for the call; you ain’t bad, but we’ve heard it all before – and it sounds like John, Paul, and George … we cut a hit and we toured a bit with a song he said he couldn’t use, and now he calls and begs and crawls; it’s telephone deja vu.”
I always wanted to hear more about the load of Jesus freaks in the VW microbus, myself.
Roy Orbison’s “Running Scared.”
???
Forty years! Forty years, and all this time I thought the sound was like “junk-haulin’ George.” John Paul and George? Srsly? What about Ringo?
I’m going to keep using my version.
Dethklok is usually pretty good, but they really shouldn’t let William Murderface write any songs.
“Puff, the Magic Dragon,” is not a happy ending for Puff, but it is for Jackie Paper. Imagine JP in his fifties still flitting around Honalee on adventures.
My interpretation of the song tends to fit with the explanation posted in Wikipedia:
"The song in its lyrics mirrors the pattern of the entire Born to Run album, beginning with a sense of desperate hope that slides slowly into despair and defeat. The song opens with the “Rat” “driving his sleek machine/over the Jersey state line” and meeting up with the “Barefoot Girl,” with whom he “takes a stab at romance and disappears down Flamingo Lane.” The song then begins to portray some of the scenes of the city and gang life in which the “Rat” is involved, with occasional references to the gang’s conflict with the police. The last two stanzas, coming after Clemons’ extended solo, describe the final fall of the “Rat” and the death of both his dreams, which “gun him down” in the “tunnels uptown,” and the love between him and the “Barefoot Girl.” The song ends with a description of the apathy towards the semi-tragic fall of the “Rat” and the lack of impact his death had- “No one watches as the ambulance pulls away/Or as the girl shuts out the bedroom light,” “Man the poets down here don’t write nothin’ at all/They just stand back and let it all be.”
[QUOTE=OneCentStamp]
Steve Miller’s “Take The Money And Run” ends happily as long as you accept that you’re expected to root for the people who killed a homeowner during a botched burglary and got away with it.
[/QUOTE]
This is a song I thought of when I made the OP, but am ambivalent about. I’m sure at the time of its release, in the still-counterculture early 70s, the tale of two lawless juvenile delinquents getting away with their crime was meant to be a ‘happy ending.’ But nowadays, as you alluded, they come off sounding like a pair of sociopaths.
Also, maybe I’m reading too much into the song but the lines about how “Bobby Sue (whoa whoa) she slipped away / Billy Joe caught up to her the very next day” but I always interpreted them as Bobby Sue trying to ditch Billie Joe. Perhaps when the cops were closing in or some such situation, she just grabbed the loot and said “Later, sucker!” (There is no honor among thieves after all.) Of course, Billy Joe caught up to her the very next day and they headed down South (presumably together), so they must’ve worked it all out. Still, I picture them each keeping one eye apiece firmly trained on the other at all times. That and the fact they are on the run forever after that…it doesn’t sound too happy an ending.
“How It Is Applied” by Echo’s Children. (Retelling of a Miles Vorkosigan story by Lois McMaster Bujold)
“Dawson’s Christian” by, I think, Duane Elms (Well, Dawson and his crew died, but that was at the beginning of the song. They came back as ghosts and saved the day.)
First hing that I thought of is Alabama’s Roll On, Eighteen Wheeler.
And Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is happy for the people who had insurance on the boat.
And at the end of The Lights Went Out in Georgia, the judge got home to eat dinner like he wanted, without ever being tormented by knowing he convicted an innocent party.
“Valentine’s Day is Over” by Billy Bragg. A woman summons the courage to get rid of her abusive boyfriend.