Joe Offer and I have bashed back and forth in the threads. The song is The Wild Plainsmen's Kind. I think an undiscovered and unfinished beauty of a song. It has a great melody and a great idea for a song lyric that may or may not have been fully realized by the author and the singer. The authors of the lyrics and the melody I have never heard of before. J. Palmer and L. Weiser. The singer is Chad Mitchell (Trio) and the song is on his solo effort Virgo Moon.

Chad is a fine voice and has been for decades. The engineer and mixer allowed parts of these lyrics to go so low into the mix as to be unintelligible and that is a crime. In some cases the lyric is so obscure as to be nearly meaningless. In many ways it is like Let Her Go Down by Steel Eye Span(Peter Knight). A great idea for a song with a good melody and killer chorus that was so poorly served by the author's verse lyric as to make no sense. To my ear it sounds like these songs were written into a corner and the author just didn't straighten them out. But they are flawed beauties.

I intend to use them both but with lyrics that make sense to the over all song. I am not talking about writing new verses but changing a tense value on a word here and there and maybe find a better rhyme now and then. The folk process maybe?

Is this acceptable? I wonder if others deal with these problems the same way I do. Or do you sing the song as written and wonder what the author had in mind?

This is an opinion and practice question with no right answer. I'm just wondering.

Don Meixner