Absurdities in songs - any examples?

Subject: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: GUEST,Lone Stranger
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 06:30 PM

Interested in singers views on 'silly' words.

My favourite example was pointed out by a local floor singer.

In 'Streets of Laredo' the lines are ,

Verse 1
1) As I walked out in the streets of Laredo
2) As I walked out in Laredo one day,
3) I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen
4) All wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay

Yeh? Line 3 = a shroud, Line 4 = He is dead, deceased, gone.

Verse 2
1) I see by your outfit you too are a cowboy
2) These words HE DID SAY as I slowly walked by .........

SLOWLY !!! - I would be a speck of dust in the distance if a corpse spoke to me as I walked past.

I can no longer sing this song without an image springing to mind of the narrator disappearing in the distance :-)

Any others have songs that have a similar effect?

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Bill D
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 06:51 PM

I've always liked the image in "The Night Visiting Song" where, after tumbling in each other's arms all night, they solemnly shake hands before he rides off. (well, to be fair, it does say he gave her a kiss also...but...)

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Herga Kitty
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 06:54 PM

I think Malcolm Austen summed it up in Lovin' Joanna......

First verse:

"I went to church last Sunday, my love she passed me by,
She only had one contact lens and she wore it in her glass eye".

Last verse:

"I played my love at marbles, And she beat me by and by,
I suspected she was cheating by the rolling of her eye....

Kitty

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Black Hawk
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 06:58 PM

Galway Shawl

.....all I could think of was the Galway Shawl

.....my heart remains with the Galway Shawl

A cross dresser perhaps?

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Black Hawk
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 07:05 PM

The Water is wide

The radio reported a cargo ship floundering off the Devonshire coast and locals plundering the beaches. (No live lost thankfully)

Singing that night I already had the set arranged and started singing this song. When I got to 'She's loaded deep as deep can be' it reminded me of the news item and I struggled to finish the song without laughing. My warped sense of humour - sorry!

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Leadfingers
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 07:05 PM

The Alamo - YOUNG Davy Crocket was laughing and dying !

Wasnt he in his sixties when he died at The Alamo ??

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 07:14 PM

Is it being a spoilsport to point out that white linen is used not just for shrouds but also for sheets? And to point out that dying people are often likely to wrapped in a sheet.

And "young" is a reasonable word to attach tosomeone engaged in a pretty crazy enterprise that involves recapturing the recklessness of his youth.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 07:30 PM

If I saw a ghost walking down the street, I'd certainly say "Oh - sheet!"

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: retrancer
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 07:55 PM

I'll pick on John Denver here - almost heaven-west virgina.


Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah river.

The Blue Ridge mountains are not in west virginia and the Shenandoah river barely is at all. neither are central features of the state as denver tributes.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: LukeKellylives (Chris)
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 08:01 PM

Oh Susanna is confusing to me.

I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee.
I'm goin' to Louisiana, my true love for to see.
It rained all the night the day I left, the weather it was dry.
The sun so hot I froze to death, Susanna don't you cry.

I don't know about you, but I think it'd be pretty damn hard to freeze to death in scorching heat.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Bert
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 09:33 PM

In the second verse of "Come to the Bower" by Allen Damron

Our hero is man enough to decide to leave the East and travel to Texas.

In the third verse

'Ma reached me down the long rifle
and I never had held it before'


Great song though.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Songster Bob
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 09:58 PM

"It rained all the night the day I left, the weather it was dry.
The sun so hot I froze to death, Susanna don't you cry."

The absurdities are intended -- duh! I think the point of this thread is UNINTENDED absurdities.

Like, from "Omie Wise" --

"Be it murder or treason, oh, what a great crime,
To drown poor Naomi and leave her behind."

Bob

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 10:23 PM

About 1974 there was a dismal song about a girl and her horse, named Wildfire. It had the lines

Oh, they say she died one winter
When there came a killing frost
And the pony she named Wildfire
Busted down its stall

Let's get this straight. She was a healthy young woman capable of galloping across the plains, and she died from a FROST?

Sounds more like a tomato plant than a person.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Joe_F
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 10:24 PM

In "Harriet Tubman", a train has a first mate and a lifeline.

In "A Sailor's Prayer", a ship's mast is "turned about".

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: GUEST,Gerry
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 10:35 PM

In one version of the Two Sisters ballad, the younger sister get pushed into the sea, floats on down to the mill dam, and gets fished out of a brook. I'm no hydrologist, but I don't think you can float down from the sea to a brook.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Muttley
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 10:42 PM

Dear Lone Stranger: read the lines again:

"I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen
All wrapped in white line as cold as the clay."

It was the LINEN that was cold - - - - NOT the cowboy.

I've heard corpses "groan" as air in the lungs or gut escaped long after they're dead ~ and that's pretty creepy: especially when it's your first DOA and you're alone in a quiet room with him/her.

And as for YOU Foolestroupe - - GO MOME and don't do that again. That was TERRIBLE

Muttley

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 18 Feb 07 - 10:53 PM

Sally Rogers' song LOVELY AGNES contains the line "We'll cross over Lake Michigan till we come to the shore."

Really? What else WOULD you do? Stop in the middle?

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 01:31 AM

Yes....Rod Stewart has a really tasteless song in which he says to some girl whom he is trying to seduce: "let your inhibitions run wild".

I don't think he clearly understands the meaning (or proper usage?) of the word "inhibitions" when he says that.

Then there's McCartney's famous "in this world in which we live in" line from "Live and Let Die".

Those are cases where we know what they're trying to say...but we wonder why they couldn't have found a better way to say it! ;-)

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 01:48 AM

Jim, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that Stan Rogers line, and your objection to it is silly, in my opinion.

Muttley, I think you are mistaken. It was the cowboy who was said to be cold as the clay, not the linen. Who the heck cares whether or not linen is cold? You...or someone else...left out the comma:

"I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen,
All wrapped in white line, as cold as the clay."

And if the dead cowboy spoke...well, hey, it's a song, right? Why can't a corpse speak in a song for purposes of telling a story? A mountain can speak in a song. A tree can speak in a song. Anything can speak in a song.

Where is your sense of imagination, people? Poetry is not to be bound in chains by the banal conventions of the literal mind.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Gurney
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 01:55 AM

Leeneia, as I remember the song, after the lines you quote, comes 'in a blizzard he was lost. She ran calling "Wlidfire....."'
So, presumably, she went out on foot in inclement weather, looking for a lost 'oss. Silly person.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Ebbie
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 02:10 AM

An old gospel song: (When you get to heaven) Shake my mother's hand for me.

What?

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 02:10 AM

leenia - Your objection to the lines in Wildfire is misconstrued. It's a lament for a girl who died in a blizzard....on foot, not riding....while searching for her horse which, for reasons unknown, had broken out of its stall and run off into the storm. A person can very easily die of exposure in a blizzard on the western plains, and it doesn't take very long. One can criticize the song for its sentimentality, I suppose, but not for anything unrealistic about the notion that a woman could die on foot in a blizzard. It's easy to become completely disoriented and lost in a blizzard, and once hypothermia sets in, you don't have long to live.

The implication is that the girl loved the horse so much that she lost her judgement. Well, such things have happened, and I daresay they will happen again.

******

Regarding "young" Davy Crockett...well, maybe the writer of that riproaring song had had his view of Davy Crockett shaped mainly by the popular 50's TV show with a young Fess Parker playing the hero. ;-) Yeah, Crockett was getting on in years when he went off to Texas and got himself "kilt" fighting Santa Ana.

Donovan did a really weird thing when he recorded it. He sing the line "his blood and his powder were dry". I always knew it as "his powder was ready and dry".

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Alec
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 02:43 AM

I was confused ,as a child, by the line in "Durham Town" by Roger Whittaker that states "When I was a boy I spent my time sittin' onn the banks of the River Tyne". The river that runs through Durham is the Wear.
A few years back the group All Saints had a song out called "Never Ever" which opened with the line "There's a few questions that I need to know.."
This always made me wonder if that meant there were also a few answers that she needed to ask.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: The Doctor
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 05:18 AM

There are many songs in which credibility is stretched to the limit. The lad in 'The Farmer's Boy' just happens to knock on the door of the one farmer who will not only take him in, but has a daughter for him to marry and a farm for him to inherit. But maybe it was the last of a long list he'd tried. In 'The Lost Lady Found' she is lost in England, but found in Ireland, because her true love happens to stop for the night at the very house where she has been imprisoned. Co-incidence is strained too in 'The Golden Glove', and 'The Knight and the Shepherd's Daughter', but my current favourite is 'The Golden Vanity', in which a little cabin-boy, whilst bobbing up and down in the water, having swum across from his own ship, manages to drill anything from two to nine holes through what should have been many feet of solid oak, sheathed in copper, and sink the enemy warship, all without anyone realising what was going on.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: GUEST,old git
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 05:48 AM

Little Hawk...I think you'll find that McCartney's line was "In this ever changing world in which we're living..."

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Alec
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 05:50 AM

I'd really,really love you to be right on this one old git but I'm afraid LH is.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Grab
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 05:56 AM

LH: "in which we live in", I think is actually "in which we're livin'".

How's about Clementine? "Drove she ducklings to the river... fell into the foaming brine." For starters, if it's a river then it's not briney, unless you're at the estuary, and then you're not really in mining country. And if the river's that bad, you don't want to be chucking ducklings into it, because they'll get washed away and you'll never see them again. And if she's going to fall in somewhere she can't swim, it'd be somewhere without a proper bank, so you'll never get the ducklings out again anyway. And what's she doing hanging around a river in the first place if she can't swim?

Graham.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Alec
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 06:04 AM

Sadly it was also McCartney who gave us "Penny Lane" in which rain pours from blue skies & a pretty nurse sells poppies for Remembrance Day (which is in November)in the height of Summer.
The supposedly devout Michael Jackson states in "We Are The World" that Jesus turned stones into bread but the Gospels record that Jesus refused to do this.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: GUEST,Lone Stranger
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 06:05 AM

Thanks all. Some great examples - keep em coming!

Muttley - you could be right but who cares about cold linen if your dead.

Question was not meant for grammatical errors but content LOL.

Songster Bob - True the question was about unintenional absurdities otherwise I could write ..

The elephant is a graceful bird
it flies from bough to bough
Lays its eggs up a rhubarb tree
and whistles like a cow

or

One fine day in the middle of the night
two dead men got up to fight
back to back they faced each other
drew their swords and shot each other

Similar lines in Oh Susannah

It rained all night the day I left
The weather it was dry
The sun so hot I froze to death
Susannah dont you cry

Peace to all

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 06:59 AM

"what's she doing hanging around a river in the first place if she can't swim"

What do you expect from someone, who for shoes, wears
"Herring Boxes, without topses!"

Such Dainty Feet!

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 07:02 AM

I know an old woman who swallowed a fly!

).K that's quite possible......
I know an old lasy who swallowed a spider!
O.K that's quite possible....
I know an old woman who swallowed a bird!
How absurd, she swallowed a bird.....says it all and she goes on to swallow what else?
Really absurd.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Alec
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 07:10 AM

"Johnny Todd" in which a woman who is pining for her beloved who has been at sea for all of a week is accosted by a complete stranger who proposes that she marry him (the stranger)the very next day.
She accepts.
Silly Cow.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 08:48 AM

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes.
There beneath the blue suburban skies
I sit, and mean while back In penny Lane...
The song is about "now" and "then" - blue suburban skies are "now", Penny Lane is "then". (Not that there's anything unlikely about blue skies in November anyway - English weather is changeable like that.)

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: SouthernCelt
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 08:50 AM

One incongruity if not absurdity in "Cherokee Bend" by Gordon Lightfoot (forgive me GL) that has always bothered me says:
It was early in the spring when the snow had disappeared they came down with a bag of skins
In the fall of the year of 1910, Daddy died by the rope down in Cherokee Bend.

Since the whole affair that got 'Daddy' hung took place in the store where he was trying to trade the skins and you get the impression that 'Daddy' killed or seriously injured someone for what they said about his "dirty little kid at his side", why did it take 4 to 6 months for him to be hanged? The second verse says the boy stayed there until his father came to his end before he ran away back to his mother. Doesn't the length of the whole event stretch credibility, especially considering that the song was a commentary on bigotry against the Indians by the whites?
SC

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: GUEST
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 09:11 AM

Fair young maid are you a weeping
For your Johnny gone to sea
If you'll wed with me tomorrow
I will kind and constant be

I will buy you sheets and blankets
I'll buy you a wedding ring
You shall have a silver cradle
For to rock the baby in

maybe fickle......
maybe mercenary......
maybe extremely sensible - a bird in the hand you know when there's a bun in the oven :)

but absurd??

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 09:20 AM

"I need of a handsome boatman, to row me to that distant shore"
First of all ....handsome....why handsome or perhaps in Victorian times it meant well made.....he would have to be to row from England to Botany Bay in Australia!

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Scrump
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 09:51 AM

"My pink half of the drainpipe, separates me from you" is plainly absurd. It doesn't separate me from you at all.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Charley Noble
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 10:20 AM

Somewhere above Little Hawk is confusing Sally Rogers with Stan Rogers while discussing "Lovely Alice." Now I've met both of these fine singers and although they were good friends, they were not related to one another and differed significantly in appearance. I believe that Stan Rogers had less hair than Sally and was about a foot taller and at least a foot wider.

Linguistic trends also introduce unintended absurdities into traditional songs; they're there lying undisturbed like mines for years just waiting to explode. Who hasn't had moments of distress singing "gay" or "seamen" as band members break up and the audience disolves into hysterical laughter?

Cheerily,
Charley Noble

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Dave Roberts
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 10:23 AM

It was in the month of Liverpool
In the City of July
The rain was snowing heavily
And the streets were very dry

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 11:22 AM

Okay, let's clear this up once and for all:

Oh, they say 1) she died one winter
When there came a killing frost
And 2)the pony she named Wildfire
Busted down its stall
3) In a blizzard he was lost

4) She ran calling Wildfire x 3
By the dark of the moon I planted
But there came an early snow
There's been a hoot-owl howling by my window now
For six nights in a row
She's coming for me, I know
And on Wildfire we're both gonna go
---------
Right. In chronological order we have 1) she died of a killing frost, just like a tomato plant.

2) Her horse seemed to sense the tragedy and broke down its stall door

3) A blizzard came, and the horse got lost. The frost must have been the first sign of the blizzard to come. That's pretty fast action, even for Nebraska, when a killing frost is expected in September and blizzards in January or February.

4) She ran calling "Wildfire," but she's already dead. See #1. So it's her ghost that's calling. The singer predicts that she will snatch him away and they both will become ghosts, riding on Wildfire's ghost.

Ornithological note: the hoot-owl, another species not in the bird books, can join the chicken hawk and the mudcat. See the thread about eating a mudcat.

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Hawker
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 12:51 PM

One of my favourites is from 'Up In The North'

The Line:
'He was a ship's carpenter's son, by his trade'!

Now what trade is that, exactly?

Cheers, Lucy

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Alec
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 12:56 PM

The Mike Oldfield song "Moonlight Shadow" makes reference to "4 A.M. in the morning"

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 01:02 PM

In Good King Wenceslas
"When a poor man came in sight, gathering winter fuel"
"Sire, he lives a good league hence....right against the forest fence"

Okay, what is this idiot pauper doing travelling a league in dangerous weather coditions to get fuel (presumably wood) when he lives right next to the forest?

CHEERS
Nigel

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 01:19 PM

Georgiansilver:
"I need of a handsome boatman, to row me to that distant shore"
First of all ....handsome....why handsome or perhaps in Victorian times it meant well made.....he would have to be to row from England to Botany Bay in Australia!
Perhaps someone at the time was confused by the homonyms 'handsome' and 'Hansom'. Unfortunately they would also have needed to mistake the origin of 'Hansom'.But the error is reasonable. Coming into use in the mid 1800s the 'Hansom Cab' replaced the 'Hackney Carriage' as the standard used by those 'plying for hire'. Hackney (then and now) was taken to mean 'plying for hire' and it would be a reasonable error to assume that the more modern vehicle had been named in the same way, rather than from the name of its creator.
So perhaps the singer is looking for a boatman for hire to do the rowing.

CHEERS
Nigel

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Jim McLean
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 01:29 PM

There's a new CD of Robert Tannahill songs except that one song is by Robert Burns, at least contributed by him to Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, a humerous song about two men going to a fair looking for a pretty girl and coming away with an old hag. (It's in the DT as Donald Cowper and his man). However a verse has been added which was written by William Motherwell for Tannahill's song (Hey Donal, How Donald) which was about a love sick lass. Adding this to Donald Cowper and his Man makes no sense at all.! What the singer thinks she is singing about, I have no idea. It's liking tacking a verse of Hey Jude onto Waltzing Matilda!

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 01:41 PM

Nigel....mmmm interesting but was not the Hansom cab made by a cab maker called Hansom? I was given to believe this on visiting Buckland Abbey in Devon. I am of course prepared to be educated on this..does someone have the 'knowledge' needed. (Excuse the pun)

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: GUEST,DocJ
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 05:10 PM

'On A Bright and Sunny Morning, the Ground All Covered in Snow...'
and losts of other silly verses from Bascom Lamar Lundsford.
What did Frank Hamilton call him?
All those broken token songs are a bit silly: stranger turns up, girl doesn't fancy him, stranger says but I'm your lost lover (has he had a transplant of some sort?), girl does fancy him ... but that's love!
That cowboy who's shrouded before he's dead: in the Bayeaux Tapestry, Edward the Confessor is buried in one scene and then he dies in the next. Licence I guess
DocJ

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 06:35 PM

Actually, you are not meant to read absolutely everything from left to right - there4 are 'chunks' where you are supposed to move (walk) on, then read left to right....

Subject: RE: Absurdities in songs - any examples?
From: Don Firth
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 07:03 PM

In songs like "John Riley" and "The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington," the guy is gone for, how long? Seven years. And when he returns, despite the fact that she loves him madly and as stayed true to him all this time, she doesn't recognize him.

Unless the fellow got his face completely rearranged by running full-tilt into a stone wall, I presume the lass in question was quite myopic, and that these songs originated before eye-glasses were invented.

In a lot of songs, stories, political speeches, et al., the "willing suspension of disbelief" is essential.

Don Firth

Subject: Lyr Add: WILDFIRE (Michael Martin Murphey)
From: Little Hawk
Date: 19 Feb 07 - 07:30 PM

Not giving up easily, eh, Leenia? (grin)

Okay....here ya go. The whole danged song lyric:

Wildfire

Wildfire
by Michael Murphey

Written by M. Murphey / L.Cansler
from the album "Blue Sky, Night Thunder"
Epic/CBS Inc. 1975 EK33290

She comes down from Yellow Mountain
On a dark, flat land she rides
On a pony she named Wildfire
Whirlwind by her side
On a cold Nebraska night.

Oh, they say she died one winter
When there came an early frost
And the pony she named Wildfire
Busted down its stall,
In a blizzard she was lost.

She ran calling Wild--fire
Calling Wild---fire
Calling Wi--i--ld--fi--i--re

By the dark of the moon I planted
But there came an early snow
Been a hoot owl howlin' outside my window now
For six nights in a row
She's comin' for me, I know
And on Wildfire we're both gonna go

We'll be ridin' Wildfire
Ridin' Wildfire
We'll be ridin' Wildfire
On Wildfire we're gonna ride

Gonna leave sodbustin' behind
Get these hard times right on out of our minds

Ridin' Wildfire




Note: It says "in a blizzard she was lost". The lack of one little letter 's' threw you off the track.

In chronological order we have:

1. storm moves in
2. horse breaks out of stall, runs off
3. girl runs into blizzard, looking for horse
4. girl gets lost in blizzard and freezes to death
5. horse vanishes
6. guy, haunted by her ghost or her memory, writes song about it, picturing himself and the girl riding Wildfire in some spirit realm or thought-dream