Top Ten Shel Silverstein Songs: Marie Laveau (#1)

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Cheers to Shel Silverstein, who’s being honored on April 8 with a postage stamp for his children’s classic The Giving Tree. And cheers to you all, for enduring this look at my favorite songs that Silverstein wrote. Here’s the top dog. #1: Marie Laveau - Bobby Bare When I started this countdown I mentioned Bobby Bare and the first album that I ever bought that my dad disapproved of. It was [i]Lullabys, Legends, and Lies.” The first single off the album wasn’t anything offensive. It was Bare, and his then five-year-old son Bobby Bare, doing a song right up The Giving Tree’s alley, “Daddy What If.” My little 13-year-old self bought the album with gleeful joy. It was my “official” introduction to Shel Silverstein. Although I knew several of the songs that are on this list, I didn’t know they were Silverstein’s songs. This, however, had Silverstein’s name emblazoned on the album cover, as every song on the album was written or co-written by him. To be blunt, they weren’t all kiddie songs. And that’s what my dad disapproved of. Included in the mix was “Paul,” about Paul Bunyan (and hardly the children’s fantasy you remember); “Rest Awhile,” about the stereotype and discrimination that motorcycle riders faced (my dad really disapproved of shedding a favorable light on bikers, given that we lived in Daytona Beach at the time and saw the people who caused the stereotype every year for Bike Week); and, “The Mermaid,” about a guy who falls in love with a mermaid and discovers there’s a problem with her anatomy (“from her head to her waist she was just my taste, but the rest of her was a fish!” ). Dad was not amused. Oh, I was. And that included regarding this song, a #1 hit for Bare later in the album’s life. It’s about a real-life voodoo queen from New Orleans who died in 1881. This wasn’t the first song about her (“The Witch Queen of New Orleans” by Redbone is also a Laveau ode) (heck, this wasn’t the first recording of this song, as another Silverstein mainstay — Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show — did it the year before Bare), and her legacy is long in music (the punk band the Misfits allegedly tried to exhume her body after they did a concert in New Orleans in 1983 ). So here’s to Bobby Bare, who did many more Silverstein songs in his career (including a song I mentioned in the introduction discussion, “Quaaludes Again,” which was the B-side of the also-Silverstein-penned “Tequila Shelia”). And here’s to Shel Silverstein, a man who wore many hats in his career before dying of a heart attack in 1999. And here’s to y’all. Thanks for reading. Marie Laveau Written by Shel Silverstein and Baxter Taylor Recorded by Bobby Bare From Lullabys, Legends, and Lies, 1973 A no-good man like you all know: