Song Lyrics I've Misheard

The topic for this week's Long And Short Reviews link-up is "song lyrics I've misheard." 

There's actually a name for the ways people, especially children, misunderstand song lyrics. If the misunderstandings are funny, or better than the original songs, they're called mondegreens,  in honor of a memorable misinterpretation of an old Scottish ballad. (The original song lamented that "They have slain the Earl of Moray and laid him on the green"; the misunderstanding brought in a love interest, Lady Mondegreen.) 

I don't have any really good ones but I do remember misunderstanding a song and being unfairly scolded for it. 

The song was one of Jim Reeves' 1950s young-love classics.

"

A long, long time ago, on graduation day 

you handed me your book; I signed this way:
Roses are red, my love; violets are blue; 

sugar is sweet, my love, but not as sweet as you.
We dated through high school, and when the big day came
I wrote into your book next to my name:
Roses are red, my love; violets are blue;

sugar is sweet, my love, but not as sweet as you.

Then I went far away and you found someone new.
I read your letter, dear, and I wrote back to you.
Roses are red, my love, violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet, my love, but not as sweet as you.

Is that your little girl? She looks so much like you!
Some day some boy will write in her book too:
Roses are red, my love, violets are blue; 

sugar is sweet, my love... Good luck! May God bless you.

"

You can hear it free of charge on YouTube:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S528Vzlzplg

Jim Reeves died a few years before I was born, but he was still an honorary part of my family/ As a little boy, in Panola County, Texas, he was baby-sat by a girl who grew up to be my grandmother. My grandparents approved of Mother's collecting Jim Reeves' records. Seeing her buying one of his albums made Dad reconsider his first opinion about Mother being beautiful but not the type of woman he wanted to marry. They got to talking, Mother admitted some interest in a husband and children and even a farm some day, Dad decided she was not the money-oriented careerist he'd thought she was, and a few years later they were married. 

They had a rule that the family radio and stereo were to be used only to play music everyone wanted to hear, or at least didn't mind hearing. This often meant their complete collection of Jim Reeves LPs. They had multiple copies of most of his albums, having worn out a few copies and learned the advantages of buying half a dozen copies of any LP you really wanted to hear over and over. They'd agree that most of his songs were silly and sentimental, but "only silly, never really bad," never incompatible with the message of the Christian songs he also recorded.

Sometimes I sang along with a record, as a little child. The'rents noticed this and started encouraging me to improve my joyful noise into something they could bear to hear. After I was ten years old, when there were three of us, they started taking us out to entertain sick and disabled patients on weekends. Our family name just didn't seem to make as good a band name as our contemporaries', The Bentons and The Kendricks. (My brother and I knew some of the members of those family bands slightly, at school, and sang with them in school groups. In addition to having better band names they were better bands. That is why they sold more albums.) Dad didn't inflict a lot of "dad jokes" on our audience, but one he never let go was that, since some of his audience still saw him as "Little" whatever-his-real-name-was, our band name was "Little (whatever) and the Three Bigguns." It was pronounced the way hillbillies say "big ones" but Dad was the only one who wrote it, and he spelled it "Bigguns." 

From time to time they bought us sheet music, but for practice, mostly, we sang along with Jim Reeves records. "Pay attention to how he enunciates the words. You can tell he's from Texas, but anybody from any country can hear what he's saying."

That was one thing to be learned from Jim Reeves. The other thing was the part about staying true to our values. Roy Drusky refused to sing really stupid songs and lost some contracts, but kept his fans. Jim-Ed Brown took a contract to record stupid songs like 'Pop a Top Again,' and lost it all. Jeannie C. Riley did one great protest song and then got stuck with a "rebel" image, with publicists who wouldn't even let her wear a more fashionable, longer dress when she wanted to; unable to rebrand herself as a gospel singer in time not to lose money, she quit singing altogether. I don't know whether "Gentleman Jim" Reeves ever had to contend with publicists wanting him to sing songs that were worse than silly, because his voice fitted his "nice, wholesome" image so well, but he kept his act wholesome, and it continued to sell long after his lifetime. 

My brother died before his voice matured. My sister had scarlet fever and lost the ability to hear most of the notes she used to sing. I never entertained any delusions about having been given the stamina or the obsessive will to become a professional musician, but I did earn a scholarship and some benefits by singing in college, and recorded one album as an adult. Not long after my album failed to interest audiences beyond the family, my sister eloped. By the time she was bringing her children to Mother's house for free baby-sitting, though, they delighted Mother by being able to sing along with her Jim Reeves records. I was just starting to write online articles as Priscilla King; someone asked for articles about favorite bands and singers, and one of my first dozen articles was the one about our being four generations of Jim Reeves fans.

So one day, before the Three Bigguns, when I was just a kid instructed to sing something for some visiting relatives, I sang one of those songs the way I heard it.

"Some day some boy will write in her book, too,

'Roses are red, my love; violets are blue;

Sugar is sweet, my love, but not...' May God bless you." 

And instead of applause, I got, "That's enough! I suppose you thought that was funny? You may apologize." 

Mother did not hear the sophisticated punctuation I heard in that song. She thought I was refusing to endorse the final blessing!