Lastly, there are songs that specifically address other songs, like (Nearly) The Wild Rover talking about how it sucks to play The Wild Rover so much.
Can anyone recommend other folk song parodies of the second type in particular? Or any good general folk parodies, for that matter? One billion bonus points if you know of a song with the line “she had a dark and roving eye, the other was pale and static”.
Todd Snider’s Talking Seattle Grunge Rock Blues is a simultaneous parody of talking blues and the music industry, but it most closely mirror’s Dylan’s “I Shall be Free No. 10.”
It’s very tricky to untangle the sources and references correctly, but the way “Carrickfergus” is usually sung (and often quite earnestly, too) - with the usually-performed verses, I mean - makes it very close to a song that is its own parody already.
Welcome to the exciting world of filk (the term first was appeared as a typo for “folk” in an article on science fiction conventions).
While filk music isn’t all parody, a lot of it is.
They have annual awards, of which the Pegasus Award is one of the biggest. Here’s the link to their site with the words to most of the winners: http://www.ovff.org/pegasus.html
The Smothers Brothers put their own twist on a lot of folk songs (for example, here’s The Saga of John Henry), though I’m not sure anything they did counts as a parody per se.