More to the point, send me your songs that are about your personal experiences! 
I’m working on an M.A. in English, and this semester I’m taking a class in folklore. For our semester project we have to pick any kind of folklore-ish topic and compile an anthology of related materials: my topic is “Personal Experience Narratives as Expressed in Songs.” What’s a personal experience narrative? Basically a story about some event, told by the person who experienced it. The event doesn’t have to be significant to anyone but the storyteller (songwriter, in my case), but it has to be a true story. Some of the materials I’ve already collected include:[ul][li]slave songs/sorrow songs[/li][li]cowboy songs[/li][li]songs about the Mississippi Delta flood of 1927[/li][li]war songs[/ul][/li]It seems like it would be easy to find personal experience narrative songs, but the parameters are narrower than it seems at first: like I said, the song should be written by the person who experienced the event, and it must be a true story. I mentioned this board to my professor, and she agrees that it’s a terrific potential source (and she’s helping me out by posting a similar request on her folklore boards/listservs). To help clarify, here are a few examples of what I am/am not looking for:
Fits the Topic[ul][li]The Beatles’s “Norwegian Wood” (Lennon wrote it about a real-life encounter)[/li][li]James Taylor’s “Fire & Rain” (written about Taylor’s reaction to the news of a friend’s death)[/ul][/li]Not So Much[ul][li]Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” (not a true story)[/li][li]Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (he wasn’t there)[/ul][/li]If you’ve written a song about a famous event, that’s perfect – if you experienced hurricane Katrina and wrote about what you saw/heard, if you were in NYC when the towers fell and wrote about what you did that day, etc. But even if your topic is seemingly mundane – a fight, the death of a loved one, something that happened while you were on vacation, etc. – I’d love to have permission to use your material.
If you think you have the kind of song I’m looking for, please e-mail me a copy of the lyrics. If you have a recording of the song and you’re willing to share it, we’ll figure out a way to get it to me. You can also simply post a link in this thread to your MySpace page, or to any site that contains your music (please observe SDMB link rules!).
All material must be original – you must own the copyright. Contacting me or posting any links in this thread grants me permission to include your song(s) in my project, including any recordings you point me to/send to me, and also permission to mention your name as the author. Sending me your material does not mean that it will definitely appear in my final project; I might have to edit for space reasons. The contents of this project will not be published in any way (only my professor will see it). I’m willing to e-mail a PDF of the final project to anyone whose contribution winds up in it.
If you have any questions about what I’m after, please feel free to ask in this thread!
