Songs

NPR has, over the course of the last decade or two, had little pieces that particularly appealed to me on two aspects of popular music.  The first, and the one I'm thinking about right now, is songs that get stuck in your head.  When they're songs you like, it's all to the good.  At the moment I have the (very pleasant) voice of Ginger Rogers singing Jerome Kern's "A Fine Romance."  It's because "Swing Time" was on TV this weekend. 

As I said, it's all to the good.  The NPR piece, however, was more about songs you don't like having rattle around in there.  We all have them, and mine aren't going to be the same as yours.  Nonetheless, the radio piece had people calling and writing in and giving their own, which of course prompted NPR to play the selected number, to I-don't-know-whose great enjoyment.  Maybe the NPR engineer who is a full-time sadist.

Anyway, after hearing the story all the way through, one disgruntled listener, who I can only presume had no on-off switch on his radio, called in to complain about how much it had ruined his day.  In retaliation, and pretty effective, in my opinion, at the end of his call he sang the first two lines of one of the verses of "Candy Man":  Who can take a rainbow/Wrap it in a sigh.  I can say I could have done without THAT.  Ann and I have a nonbinding agreement that we don't talk about songs that are in our head, for this very reason, though I break the agreement more often than she does.  That's ok, she tells me her dreams sometimes, so I figure we're kind of even.

The other piece was on things we think songs say, that they really don't.  These are called "Mondegreens," a nonsense word which itself was an early mondegreen.  An example is from the classic Neil Young song, "Tell me Why," which instead of "When you're old enough to repay/but young enough to sell" half of the Neil-Young following population thinks is "When you're old enough to repaint/But young enough to sell."  Which, when you think about it, may make more sense.

Anyway, the NPR piece was funny because things that people think the songs say can be a hoot, mostly from the pictures they conjure up.

Again, a lot of people called or wrote NPR in response to the mondegreen segment.  There were a lot of very funny ones, but my favorite was what some imaginative soul heard in the Davy Crockett movie song.  Among his other attributes, Davy apparently was "killed in a bar when he was only 3."

I haven't been able to find the exact photo I'm looking for on google, because necessarily the toddler would have a knife clenched between his teeth and a broken-off beer bottle in his hand.  I'm thinking with Davy's reputation it took at least five full-grown men to take him down.  Anyway, I did find one photo that at least gave the idea, though he obviously is way older than the real 3-year-old.  In any event, I guess the whole Alamo thing was just part of the legend.