Mondegreen Blues
Now when I get the blues I’m gonna get me a rocket ship
Now when I get the blues I’m gonna get me a rocket ship
When the blues overtake me gonna rocket right away from hereFlip, Flop, Fly – Calhoun/ Big Joe Turner
I’m embarrassed to admit how many years it was before I realized that this was a mondegreen.
(Mondegreen is a name for the kind of global mishearing of the Scuse me while I kiss this guy sort, coined by Sylvia Wright, who misheard They had slain the Earl of Moray/And laid him on the green as They had slain the Earl of Moray/And Lady Mondegreen)
The actual lyrics are
Now when I get the blues I’m gonna get me a rocking chair
Now when I get the blues I’m gonna get me a rocking chair
When the blues overtake me gonna rock it right away from here
Personally, I think mine make more sense, but I admit that’s an unusual case. I don’t know whether I’m particularly prone to mondegreens, but I’ve certainly come up with some doozies.
For instance, it was only a few months ago that I realized that the Allman Brothers song did not go Lord, I was born and raised in Maine . I see by Google that at least some other people hear it as Lord, I was born in Rambling Maine, so I’m not a complete loon. And I thought that Chaka Khan was being a bit ambitious when she wanted to Climb Every Woman (It turns out that she was actually stating the claim I’m Every Woman. But so is Whitney Houston. Does that mean that Chaka and Whitney are the same person?)
Possibly my favorite that I didn’t hear myself is “I see a Renoir and I want to paint it black”.
What are your favorite mondegreens?
June 18th, 2004 at 10:24 am
my favourite mondegreen is one a friend of mine once pulled:
in high school, she sort of was a fan of the podigy and liked their song “poison”, which includes the line I got the poison, I got the remedy over and over again. what she hear, though, was I got the poison, I got the remoulade, for, you see, she was still learning english and did not know the word poison yet, but she did know the french word poisson, which means fish, so she just assumed that poison does mean fish as well. and what do you eat with fish? of course, remoulade.
June 18th, 2004 at 10:51 am
I like it! BTW I think the lyrics actually go “If you gots the poison, I gots the remedy”, but when it comes to mondegreens, it’s all good. And now that you remind me of it, that one definitely goes in my list of unusual constructions in songs. Except maybe it’s a standard construction in BVE. Hmmm.
June 18th, 2004 at 11:01 pm
I always find myself supremely annoyed when I think my mondegreen lyrics are better than the original. One song in particular I had thought heartbreakingly lovely, until I consulted the lyrics sheet in the CD insert, and discovered that the lyrics were nowhere near as good as I’d been giving the author credit for.
Ruined the whole song for me.
June 19th, 2004 at 12:18 am
Yeah, I was disappointed when I realized that the line in Robyn Hitchcock’s _Listening to the Higsons_ ran _I’m running out of living_ instead of _I’m running out of lyrics_. I’ve even been tempted to pen a song myself, just to use that line.
June 22nd, 2004 at 6:01 pm
Am I the only person who finds listening to other people’s mondegreens as tedious as listening to other people’s dreams, however fascinating one’s own?
June 24th, 2004 at 9:08 am
Judging by the sales of Gavin Edwards’s four (!) books of mondegreens, yes, you are the only person in the world who feels that way. Just as I am the only English-speaker on the planet who hasn’t read The DaVinci Code.
July 22nd, 2004 at 12:16 am
never heard the word mondegreen before but the words to a song found in a luxurious 3-record set “Mercury Country” released in Japan:
“Jesus brought me a blue owl in my caboose” when carefully listened to revealed
“Jesus brought me through all my troubles.”
You must admit the English heard by the Japanese transcriber was far more interesting than the real(?) thing!
This is taken from ch.7 of “Orientalism & Occidentalism — Is the Mistranslation of culture inevitable” (info at http://www.paraverse.org).
And I must confess to appreciating Stardust Memories more when I thought the last words were “the memory of love refrained.”
August 8th, 2004 at 11:45 pm
Yes, other people’s dreams are tedious, but certainly not their mondegreens. I, too, hate it when I think my mondegreen is better than the original. Classic example is “Signs” by Five Man Electric Jam (remade by Tesla). It’s not, “Sign, sign, everywhere a sign / Talkin’ up the scenery, breakin’ my mind.” Very poetic, I thought, until I discovered that the signs are merely “blockin’ out” the scenery. Sigh.