What I’ve Learned

Lady Mondegreen was born in 1954. To fully appreciate her origins, we need to understand fake books and then jump around a bit in time.A fake book is a collection of songs, each written in its simplest form: lyric, basic melody, and chord symbols. Such collections allow musicians to answer requests by providing just enough info for a song to be faked. Some fake books are enormous, containing hundreds and hundreds of songs.A pianist in a restaurant might get a request to play “I Get Along Without You Very Well” by Hoagy Carmichael. Not a song the pianist knows? No problem. A quick look in a fake book, and the pianist can muddle through it well enough to earn a tip.In 1765, Bishop Thomas Percy published “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” which came to be known simply as Percy’s Reliques. The book might be thought of as the first fake book, as it contained the words to one hundred and eighty ancient ballads.Now leap ahead to 1917, the year that an American humorist, Sylvia Wright, was born. When Sylvia was a little girl, her mother used to read to her from Percy’s Reliques. (To me, this is not at all weird, as my mother used to read me poems by Rudyard Kipling, many of which were not at all age appropriate. See, for instance, The Young British Soldier.)Among the old ballads Sylvia’s mother read was “The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray.” One stanza touched the young girl’s heart: “Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands, Oh where have you been? They have slain the Earl o’ Moray And layd him on the green.”In 1954 in Harper’s Magazine, Wright explained that the reason the verse had touched her was that she’d misheard the last line: “And layd him on the green.” To her young ears it sounded like “And Lady Mondegreen.” And she’d felt sad that not only had they killed the Earl of Moray, but also his lady.So in 1954, though there was no Lady Mondegreen, she suddenly came to life as a term for a misheard lyric or statement, a mondegreen.Here are a few.A person said he’d misheard the title, The Londonderry Air (the tune to which Danny Boy was written), as The London Derriere.For awhile, I thought the Fifth Dimension’s song, Aquarius, was a song about asparagus. (“This is the dawning of the Age of Asparagus.” Was happy to find out my mistake.)In Toto’s song, Africa, the line “I bless the rains down in Africa,” was heard by some as “I left my brains down in Africa.” I’d always heard it as “I guess it rains . . . .”One of the best mondegreen generators was a line in Elton John’s Rocket Man. The correct lyric is “burning out his fuse up here alone.” People heard it as everything from “I’m burning out this useless telephone.” to something to do with provolone.Ah, Lady Mondegreen, for a dead woman who never existed, you’ve brought us much joy.