Odes to Dads Both Good and Bad : Whether Papa was a rolling stone or a homebody, here’s plenty of proof that he’s songwriting material.

Looking for the perfect Father’s Day gift? Try immortalizing the old man in verse or song. You’ll join some elite company.

What follows is an off-the-top-of-my-head selection of pop, rock and country songs about fatherhood that pass the no-schmaltz, all-honesty test--many to a painful degree.

Let’s start with songs that immortalize the old man after the old man has proven mortal.

In “Your Dad Did,” John Hiatt, one of rock’s best and most persistent chroniclers of domestic life, is humorously beleaguered by work pressures and family tumult but remembers his similarly hard-pressed father and guts it out: “You love your wife and kids, just like your dad did.’

The excellent folk-country songwriter Guy Clark has given us two quiet gems in “The Randall Knife,” in which a son’s dammed-up tears fall as he handles his dead father’s prized possession, and the unforgettable “Desperados Waiting for a Train.” Popularized by Jerry Jeff Walker, it’s a fond but poignant elegy not only for a beloved grandfather figure, but for a vanishing slice of the Texas past.

The late Steve Goodman honored his late father in “My Old Man,” declining to smooth out the rough edges between fathers and sons but leaving us with advice to ponder: “I’d give all I own/To hear what he said when I wasn’t listening/To my old man.”

Most moving, for me, were songs that evoked the wonder and awesome, humbling responsibility that goes with raising small children.

Listen to Paul Westerberg’s heart swell as he watches his toddler’s early steps--and realizes that one day they will head away from him--in “Angels Walk.” Neil Young’s luminous “I Am a Child” is also about the enchantment and immense demands of fatherhood: “I gave to you, now you give to me/I’d like to know what you’ve learned,” sings the song’s knee-high narrator. Hum those lines the next time you feel yourself getting impatient with your kids’ incessant questions.

A song that infallibly wets my eyes with its piercing beauty is Graham Parker’s “The Kid With the Butterfly Net.” The famously flinty rocker watches his daughter frolic in a field; her free and innocent spirit makes him believe, if only for a moment, that his own spirit has been reborn: “And all the darkness in you flies out through the window . . . All the chains around you cannot keep you prisoner/They haven’t been forged yet/For the kid with the butterfly net.”

Now we get to the gritty stuff: the pain of the estranged father and of the abandoned child.

Chuck Berry handles the subject of divorce with his incomparable lightness of being in “Memphis,” begging help from a long-distance operator after his ex-wife has spirited his little girl away without leaving a phone number. The Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” a landmark epic of funky, orchestral soul music, musters incomparable tension as a son who never knew his shady bounder of a dad seeks answers after his death: “Mama, I’m depending on you to tell me the truth.”

Two of Orange County’s best bands, Chris Gaffney & the Cold Hard Facts and Missiles of October, have added to the songwriter’s canon of hurting fathers and children--Gaffney in “Daddy’s Little Girl,” a divorce lament in march time, and the Missiles in “Look at Daddy Run,” a bubbly song on the surface that underneath seethes bitterly about abandonment: “I call him ‘Daddy-O, the O’s for nothin.”’

In “If We Make It Through December,” Merle Haggard, the voice of the working man, sings with gentle dignity and sadness about what it’s like to be jobless, broke and the father of a young child at Christmastime.

Randy Newman stands atop a pop pinnacle--or in the bottom of a hellish pit--as a chronicler of curdled father-son relationships: “Old Man” is a brilliant depiction of handed-down hardheartedness, and nuggets like “Four Eyes,” “So Long Dad,” “My Life Is Good” and “I Want You to Hurt Like I Do” further underscore the harsh consequences of having an unkind father. Two monumental bookends sung from opposite sides of the great generational divide:

“Tears of Rage,” by the Band, with lyrics by Bob Dylan and music and vocal by Richard Manuel. One of the all-time peaks of artistry in rock songwriting and performance, it carries an intimation of “King Lear” in its angry, plaintive, baffled wail of a father whose values have been betrayed. If you want to understand something about the generational upheaval of the ‘60s in one five-minute lesson, here you have it.

Play it back to back with Bruce Springsteen’s “Independence Day.” Here’s a ‘60s kid trying to part gently from--but using words that must sound like daggers to--the dad he feels compelled to forsake for his own freedom’s sake.

If you need further prompting to write that poem or song or letter for the old man, consider “This Father’s Day” by Peter Himmelman. Lacking a present for his dying dad, he strummed and sang into a tape recorder, his throat constricting in a failed defense against sobs of love and grief as he got to the last verse:

“And if I could I’d run out into the world/And tell every boy and girl/To love before love takes itself away/Just like I’m loving you, this Father’s Day.”