Just remember!!

Some years ago, when I was working in the Production Illustration department of the Boeing Airplane Company (day job), one of the other illustrators was a woman from Texas. She had such a strong Southern accent that sometimes it wasn't real easy to figure out what she was saying.

One day as a bunch of us were sitting around a drawing table eating lunch, she was talking about the old family homestead in Texas. She mentioned that they actually had "three all wails" on their property.

Wot the hell is an "all wail?"

It took a few minutes to figure out that she was talking about "three oil wells!"

Makes the theory that the original words in the ballad were "olive green" quite likely. And I suspect that regional accents and dialects are responsible for a lot of mondegreens.

Don Firth