That material informed Beck's earliest recordings, like "One Foot in the Grave" (1994), where he replaced the gravitas of the original performers with less reverential lyrics.
Its new album, "Codes and Keys" (Atlantic), features more electro-shimmer and less personal lyrics, but it is still genteel at heart.
But underneath the retro outfit it's the same old Neil: sturdy melodies wedded to less sturdy lyrics, sometimes dark, sometimes dopey.
Longfellow adapted European methods of storytelling and versifying to narrative poems dealing with American history, and a few of his less didactic lyrics perfectly married technique and subject matter.
It reminded me of another respectable widow, Mrs Wentworth-Brewster, who, in one of Noël Coward's less respectable lyrics, came over all girlish in A Bar at the Piccola Marina.
The follow-up features slightly less bleak lyrics, with love added to his monochromatic palette of loss, isolation and death, but his sound remains hard to categorise, with much of his third album sounding like an unlikely fusion of Stevie Wonder and Burial.
Since 1991, Walmart has not carried music albums marked with the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA's) Parental Advisory Label (contradictory to the allowance of R-rated movies and video games rated Mature), although it carries edited versions of such albums, with obscenities removed or overdubbed with less offensive lyrics.
The most popular rappers are less than lyrical or just down right lyric-less.
Spotify can't offer a native search-by-lyrics feature in its app, much less search-by-lyrics using voice commands option, because it doesn't even have fully functional lyrics.
Winning made Iverson's misogynistic rap lyrics less of an enticing story.
