Lest my title confuse you, allow me to clarify that the focus of this column is not Christmas songs. I will not be slamming you holiday-jumpers who are already listening to Christmas music before Thanksgiving even gets here. (Don’t worry. I’m listening, too!)
No, I was simply wondering if any of the rest of you sometimes have trouble correctly hearing song lyrics. Maybe you’ve been singing a song a certain way all of your life only to find you were way off base.
As an example, I will share a somewhat embarrassing personal story. When I was a young girl, we kids would try to find a song with our name in it. Youth of the ’50s had Ritchie Valens singing about “Donna” and Debbie Reynolds popularizing “Tammy.” In the ’60s, the Beach Boys needed help from “Rhonda,” while Frankie Valli’s falsetto cried out for “Sherry Baby.” Many a girl born in the ’70s was named “Brandy” after the popular song by Looking Glass. Loggins and Messina brought a boy into the mix with “Danny’s Song.” In the ’80s, John Cougar Mellencamp made it equal opportunity with “Jack and Diane.” “Billie Jean” could have been either gender, but Michael Jackson specified female.
Girls’ names predominated. And so little Leslie Bray searched for a song with her name in it — not an easy task with an uncommon first name. Imagine my joy when I found one: “Groovin’” by The Young Rascals! Imagine my despair when, decades later, my children burst my bubble. There we were riding down the road listening to oldies when that song came on. Excitedly, I told them this was the one song with my name in it, then I sang at the top of my lungs, “Life would be ecstasy, you and me and Leslie!”
I forget which of my young rascals broke the news to me that The Young Rascals were not saying my name at all. Instead, they were singing, “you and me END-LESS-LY!” Despite my heartbreak, that newfound knowledge DID explain something that had puzzled me for years: Why would life be so terrific with a love triangle of you and me and Leslie?
This phenomenon of mishearing lyrics to give them a new meaning actually has a name: mondegreen. A mondegreen is usually created by someone mishearing phrases from a poem or song and substituting similar-sounding words that may or may not make sense.
This term, now in most dictionaries, came about in 1954 when American writer Sylvia Wright recounted a story from her childhood. When her mother would read to her from a 1765 book of poems, young Sylvia lamented the fact that in her favorite poem, the villains had killed “the Earl Amurray and Lady Mondegreen.” But it wasn’t true. The bad guys had killed only the Earl Amurray “and laid him on the green.” Thus was born the term used to describe me thinking the “Groovin’” song was about me. (Carly Simon might say to me “You’re So Vain.”)
There are actually scientific reasons for the misinterpretation of lyrics. One explanation is that when we hear phrases we aren’t familiar with, we reinterpret them as something that makes more sense to us. For example, in the Jimi Hendrix classic, “Purple Haze,” the lyrics are “Excuse me while I kiss the sky.” This unfamiliar concept led my friend Rachel’s husband to think Jimi sang, “’scuse me while I kiss this guy.”
Mondegreens are also sometimes created when the singer has a foreign accent. If we can’t understand the phrasing, we make sense of it the best we can and often get incorrect lyrics burned into our mental hard drive. Although I was an Elton John fanatic as a teen, playing his albums incessantly, his British inflections sometimes confused me.
Thus, until I was a mature adult, I sang the chorus of his “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” as such: “So goodbye yellow brick road/Where the dark clouds around me howl.” That made sense to young Leslie, in a personification kind of way. He actually sings, “where the dogs of society howl.”
I continued that Elton John chorus as “Back to hanging around in the woods.” Nope again. It is “Back to the howling old owl in the woods.” Yet again, my mondegreen version seemed logical to me.
We also tend to misinterpret lyrics more often when we are introduced to a song at a very young age. As a youth, my cousin Regina sang The Marshall Tucker Band’s hit song as “Turtles in a love song, Can’t be a frog.” She later learned it was really “Heard it in a love song/Can’t be wrong.”
My friend Christi was very young when she thought she heard Kenny Rogers singing about Lucille leaving him with “400 children and a crop in the field.” Okay, so it was really “four hungry children.” Lucille was not astronomically fertile — just heartless.
Speaking of the late Kenny Rogers, my pal Marian recalls her daughter Amanda singing along with Kenny and Dolly Parton about “Islands in the Street.” Marian endeavored to correct it to “Islands in the Stream,” but young Amanda refused to believe her. (Let’s hope it didn’t come back to bite her in geography class.)
Sometimes the context of a song actually lends itself to misinterpretation of lyrics. My friend Tonya heard Huey Lewis and the News mentioning several different cities in their song, “The Heart of Rock And Roll.” So quite logically, she thought the chorus was, “They say the heart of rock and roll is Topeka.” Hey, Kansas IS near the middle of our country, so why couldn’t its capital city be the heart of our nation’s music? The good news for Tonya is that “the heart of rock and roll is still beating,” so she now knows the correct lyrics.
If someone you know substitutes erroneous lyrics often, he/she could be suffering from a case of chronic “lyricosis” (a real word not yet in the dictionary). Before Google, the only cure for this malady was to hope the singer put the lyrics on the inside of the album cover. If not, you kept singing the wrong words in blissful ignorance.
As for me, I intend to continue singing “Groovin’” the way I did on The Old Paths. Sometimes you just can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Or new lyrics.
Leslie Bray Brewer can be emailed at theoldpathsatwalnutcove@yahoo.com. Her blog is at https://ift.tt/2A1SaOd.
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November 18, 2020 at 11:35PM
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The Old Paths: Do you hear what I hear? - The Stokes News
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