By Lee Weinstein: Misheard song lyrics can be very entertaining. A very common example is people hearing “there’s a bathroom on the right” for “there’s a bad moon on the rise,” in Creedence Clearwater’s “Bad Moon Rising.” Another is “the girl with colitis goes by” for “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” from the Beatles’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Those examples are misunderstood by numerous people, while others may be misunderstood by a single individual. 

The phenomenon has to do with the way the brain processes the auditory signal from the ears, which can be affected by, among other things, clarity, inflection, context, and expectation of the listener. 

With the advent of the internet, years ago, I often liked to look up song lyrics, sometimes just for fun and sometimes to clear up questions about difficult to understand lyrics. In the process I came across several websites devoted to the subject of misheard lyrics. I discovered that misheard lyrics are often referred to as “mondegreens.” Being the curious guy I am, I did some further searching online and discovered that the term was introduced by a journalist named Sylvia Wright. I eventually found a copy of the article where she introduced the term.

Her article, titled “The Death of Lady Mondegreen” was published in Harper’s Magazine in 1954. She recounted how she had listened to a poem recited to her by her mother while she was a child. It was a popular Scottish ballad called “The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray.” As she listened, one of the lines sounded to her like “they had slain the Earl o’ Moray and Lady Mondegreen.” She then went on to explain how she had clearly visualized the body of Lady Mondegreen lying on the ground in a pool of blood. She noted that although the poor lady was never mentioned again in the ballad, it was still enough to make a lasting impression on her. Eventually, she discovered what the real lyrics were. They actually said “…they had slain the Earl o’ Moray and laid him on the green. “Lady Mondegreen,” vivid as she was, had only existed in her imagination.

But she added the word “mondegreen” to the language, and as previously noted, there are websites devoted to mondegreens. I idly wondered about Sylvia Wright, who she was, and what else she might have written, but I didn’t pursue it at the time. She was obviously a very imaginative woman and, as I found out later, she came by it quite honestly.

I’ve often misunderstood lyrics, myself. I had always thought that Del Shannon sang “I’m a- walking in the rain / to the ball and I feel the pain,” in his hit song, “Runaway,” but he was really singing, “…tears are falling and I feel the pain.” I was also surprised to find out that the line in “California Dreaming” by the Mommas and the Papas, that I thought was “I got down on my knees and I began to pray,” was actually “I got down on my knees and I pretend to pray.” Who knew?

But Miss Wright’s “Lady Mondegreen” brought to mind a very similar misunderstanding of my own. I always liked Arlo Guthrie’s song, “Alice’s Restaurant” and listened to it numerous times over the years. Toward the end of the song, Arlo asks his audience to sing along with him on the chorus,”…when it comes around again on the guitar.” When they do sing the chorus along with him. Arlo says “That was terrible!” followed by laughter from the audience. Then he says “We don’t want Ann Warren stuff – ya gotta sing LOUD!” More laughter.

Every time I heard it, I wondered about this Ann Warren. Who was she? What songs did she perform? Evidently, from the context, she was an artist who was notable for singing in a soft, quiet manner. The audience was obviously laughing in recognition of what seemed to be a good-natured in-joke at her expense. I pictured her as a frail, soft-spoken young woman who perhaps performed at folk festivals. It was something I would wonder about each time I heard the song, but afterward it was strictly out of sight, out of mind.

That ended when the internet came into being and as a librarian I sat before a computer screen every day with access to the rapidly growing world-wide web. The next time the song came to mind, I had the means, and I did attempt to search for information on her. But as I discovered, it can be difficult to find something online when there is something else, much more well-known, sharing the same name.

Thus, not long ago, when I tried to find a locally written and produced play in Philadelphia called The Elephant Man, I could only find references to the same-named and much more famous Broadway play by Bernard Pomerance, which came out about the same time in the late 1970’s.

Another time I attempted to find information about a popular 1967 song called “Sandy,” credited to an artist named “Dawn.” Whenever I tried to find this artist online I could only come up with the later group “Dawn” who performed with Tony Orlando.

Similarly, when I tried to search for Ann Warren, all I could find were references to the actress Leslie Ann Warren. She was an actress who sometimes performed in musicals and didn’t go by just her middle name. She was a fine singer, and her voice wasn’t especially difficult to hear. I concluded she was not the person I was looking for.

It was sometime in the 1990’s that I found the answer. It had never occurred to me to look for the actual words to “Alice’s Restaurant.” When I found them online I was surprised, and perhaps a little disappointed, that “Ann Warren” was quite literally a mondegreen. What Arlo was actually saying was “…if you want to end war and stuff, ya gotta sing loud!” Like Lady Mondegreen, she suddenly ceased to exist. I felt a moment of disorientation.  Huh? There was no Ann Warren? No one else I know had ever misheard it that way, but she had been real to me.

I eventually found out, quite recently, about the locally produced Elephant Man play, when by sheer happenstance, I met the playwright, one Tom Gibbons. Among other things, he told me the play had later been retitled “The Exhibition.” If only I had known that …  

After several years of diligent, if desultory, searching I was able to find out that the first “Dawn” was a young Philadelphia singer whose real name was Joan Capetola. She and her family had given permission to Orlando to use the name for his group.

But I never found Ann Warren, because, like Lady Mondegreen, there was nothing to find. However, when I listened again to “Alice’s Restaurant,” it still sounded like “Ann Warren” to me. Sometimes it’s difficult to unhear these things. Admittedly, I still kind of wish there had been an Ann Warren.

As previously noted, where a sound is unclear, the brain often fills in the information, colored by expectations of the listener. In this case,“want to end war and stuff” does sound like “want Ann Warren stuff.” But the “we don’t…” had been filled in by my brain. It was created by what I was expecting to hear.

One day, recently, while thinking about the subject, I decided out of curiosity to look up information on Sylvia Wright, herself, to see what else she had written. I was surprised to learn that she was closely related to several people well-known in the fantasy and horror genres. Her father, I discovered, was Austin Tappan Wright, the author of the classic cult novel, Islandia. Her sister, Phyllis, was the mother of Tappan Wright King, who served as editor of both Twilight Zone magazine and Night Cry magazine. In 1978 King married Beth Meacham, since a notable editor for Tor Books

Wright, who had created Islandia as a hobby, died tragically in an automobile accident in 1931. He had spent many years creating this fictitious country, with detailed information about the history, language, population, mapping, and even the geology of the Karain subcontinent where Islandia was. It was all as meticulously thought out as Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

Among his papers was a thick, 600,000 word manuscript, written in longhand, telling the story of young John Lang, appointed as American consul to Islandia, and his travels and observations. It was far too long to publish, but his widow, Margaret Stone, began the task of editing the mammoth manuscript down to a publishable length. When she passed away in 1937, the remainder of the job fell to Sylvia, and when she had reduced it to 400,000 words, it was published in 1942 by Farrar and Rinehart, with an introduction by Leonard Bacon, poet, critic and friend of the author. It also contained a short note at the end by Sylvia about the editing process.

Then, in 1958, a new edition was published, for which she wrote a long introduction about her father, replacing Bacon’s. She mentions, among other things, that he had first conceived of Islandia as a child. His younger brother and their father, Sylvia’s grandfather, had also created and mapped imaginary places. At the end of the edition she added an afterword, giving a synoptic history of the imaginary country as told by an Islandian historian.

The novel, a fantasy only by setting, with no supernatural elements, is classified as a utopia. It developed a following and spawned three sequels written by Mark Saxton, who had also helped with the editing.

As for Sylvia, sadly she passed away in 1981 at the age of 64. She had worked as a features editor for Harper’s Bazaar Magazine and is remembered mainly as a humorist. Her best-known book was a collection of humorous essays called Get Away From Me with those Christmas Gifts and Other Reactions (1957). This collection contains, in addition to her essay on the death of Lady Mondegreen, a short, whimsical tale, “The Quest for Lady Mondegreen”, set in its own universe, more akin to Alice in Wonderland than to Islandia. In it, the character Lady Mondegreen goes on a quest to find the Earl o’ Moray, accompanied by people mentioned in her original essay: Good Mrs. Murphy (“Surely Good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life…) Harold (Harold be thy name), and other such — mondegreens.

As for Ann Warren, I’m afraid she will never achieve such literary immortality, if it can be called that, but nevertheless, I continue to remember her fondly.

[Lee Weinstein’s website is: https://leestein2003.wordpress.com/]