Tuesday, August 06, 2013

'Mondegreens' in songs

I was half listening to Radio 4 today when I heard Stuart Maconie talking about 'mondegreens' - misheard lyrics in songs and poems. He mentioned a few well known ones (all of them taken from Wikipedia I think) such as Jimi Hendrix apparently singing 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy' (in reality 'kiss the sky' and Creedence Clearwater Revival singing 'there's a bathroom on the right' ('there's a bad moon on the rise'). He also mentioned the unintelligible lyrics in the Kingsmen's Louie Louie, which some people thought were obscene. I always thought that they were unintelligible because the band didn't actually know what the real lyrics were and they therefore mumbled instead. Whatever the truth it was a great record.
There are a couple of other examples that come to mind. I always thought Desmond Dekker sang 'get up in the morning, same thing for breakfast' (actually 'slaving for bread sir'). And I could never understand why Jimmy Jones sang about a 'pin slide rule' in Handy Man (actually 'pencil and rule')
I'm sure there are many other examples and suggestions are more than welcome.

2 Comments:

At 7:15 pm , Anonymous Alan said...

A friend of mine in Australia way back used to talk of a song called "Hey there Rodrigo". The song was actually "Brown-Eyed Girl" (Hey where did we go?".

 
At 3:59 pm , Blogger Nick said...

Just listening to Eddie Cochran's Drive In Show and I was sure he sang 'I bet my penis to a candy bar'. Apparently the word was actually 'peanuts'.

 

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