History Will Be the Judge of Songs That Confuse Children

Mixing two prompts, just because it can, this web site considers the way the folk process has actually enshrined some of the best mondegreens--the ways people reinterpret unfamiliar or unexpected words in song lyrics they hear "wrong."

A song that simply confused me when I was a child was a popular song of Young Romance: "I'll build you a castle at the end of the rainbow."

Clearly derived from this song by Bing Crosby:

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

--which is what Google offers for the song title, what I heard was actually 

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

I heard it on an old record around the same time I first read Alice in Wonderland--I must have been about four years old, too young to make much sense even of that nonsense novel. Alice, you may remember, used the phrase "fly into a passion" where we might say "throw a tantrum." I'd heard the word "passion" before--something to do with churches we did not attend, and a word found in popular songs. I thought that song was one of them. That was what increased my confusion to the point where I asked an adult what a passion was, exactly, and was told it was a word four-year-olds didn't need to know. Or "Maybe you meant 'passing'?" my mother suggested, and led me off into a discussion of the ways "passing" can be used in English, which was useful. At some point I asked what the singer was promising to build in the song "As Long as I'm Dreaming," and some adult explained the word "mansion," which was also useful. I had to figure out the different, though related, meanings of "passion" for myself.

And the adult who assumed I'd heard "mansion" was confused, too, because in the digital stereo version the word is, unmistakably, "castle." But in the 1960s I listened to the record several times; the record wasn't new, and it did sound more like "mansion" or "passion." My family also heard Porter Wagoner as singing "But dreaming of bluebirds will wake you each morning; the garden of roses will wither in June," lamenting the disappointment of waking up from his happy dream...

Nobody was building a passion as a sort of nest for someone to fly into, but consider the history of an old popular song that was originally titled "The Pale Aronatus." It would not have been the song the little girl had learned to sing in Jane Eyre. It probably was a derivative; "Maud Irving," the author of "Pale Aronatus," seems to have been a derivative songwriter, specializing in singable doggerel versions of songs from the less-than-classical opera of Jane Eyre's time.

Scientists never called this "blue-eyed tulip" Aronatus, but florists who wanted to sound educated might have done. Maud Irving, who might have been nicknamed "Maud the Fraud" by anyone who guessed what he was using as a pen name, might have thought that was a classy name for it. Anyway his song portrayed the girl with now fashionable ringlets of raven-black hair loading her head with roses, lilies, myrtle, and tulips. Maybe people would be so busy marvelling at this walking--or, she at least daydreamed, dancing!--flower show that they wouldn't even notice her bloodshot eyes. 

More about Maud Irving, aronatus, and other things related to "The Wildwood Flower": 

https://www.ergo-sum.net/music/MaudIrving.html

The folk process did lots of different things with this song. Few if any people knew what an aronatus was, or how to pronounce the accented vowel. The flower became an amaranthus or an amaryllis, or, apparently by someone's mis-hearing "amaryllis," "lyder." (What was a lyder--pronounced like "leader"? Google lists it as a man's name, with possible origins including herr as "boss" or even "leader," or a variant form of a German word related to "lout" and meaning something like "good-for-nothing." It seems never to have been recorded as the name used for any flower. A.P. Carter wrote it down, and his wife and sister-in-law sang it, in good faith that somebody Out There thought it was a kind of flower.) "Pale" is recorded as an original variant form of "pole," as in "palings" or "palisades," but people seem to have accepted it as either a description of the lyder, whatever that was, or a reference to some other pale-colored flower. In any case, when the Carters wrote down "the pale and the lyder" as other things the girl was planning to stick in her hair, they added a recognizable flower to make some sense out of the line: "the pale and the lyder, and iris light blue."

Roses, lilies, myrtle, two unknown wild wood flowers for which she'd made up her own names, and an iris? Even if her raven-black hair is the thick, strong kind sometimes called Cherokee, which is difficult but not impossible to force to form ringlets, nobody could load all of those flowers onto one head, nor do they all bloom at one time. So she's looking forward to a long, busy party season in which she'll decorate her hair with all the different flowers in the garden, as they bloom, one after another. Now we have a good mental image of the girl and can move on to her plans to party.

Myrtle, by the way, could have been understood to mean vincas, the most popular varieties of which are light blue. 

And another version that might very easily have come between "pale amaryllis" and "the pale and the lyder" might have given the girl a traditional English name, which was in use where the Carters lived: she might have been "Poor pale Amaleta with eyes of light blue." Old name dictionaries list many variants of Amalie, Emily, and Amelia that were used about a hundred years ago--Amalina, Amelinda, Amelita, and my home town had a real local character whose name was Amaleta, whom the Carters might even have met. The real-world Amaleta was born around 1920, when this name was no longer trendy, so she might have been named in honor of some older person, or from the song as it might have been sung around 1920. If A.P. Carter's source heard and sang the song as calling the girl "pale Amaleta," that would explain how the Carters got to "the pale and the lyder." People at https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.folk/c/KceW6M1LHoo?pli=1 seemed to want to hear "amanita," which was not (often, if ever!) used as a name, but some form of "Amaleta" is a solid possibility.

Or maybe someone heard the song as calling her "pale Angelita." Spanish language and culture were considered romantic in the early twentieth century, and the Carters weren't purists about preserving only British folk songs.

Or, possibly, "amorita," "little love," which I've not found in local use. I suspect locals would have associated this name with the Amorites in the Bible--barbarian enemies--but it was used in other places where English was spoken in the nineteenth century. 

Various Googlers also propose "paling althea," "pale amaretto," and "pale angelica" (if pronounced by Italian phonetic rules, though the English pronunciation was better known), if you read through the discussion linked above. I suspect the trail of mondegreens leads from "aronatus" through "amaranthus," "amaryllis," and either "Amaleta" or "Angelita."

Someone in that group speculated that future generations may sing the line as "the pale enchilada, and rice is taboo"--so on the way to the dance the girl stops at the local Mexican restaurant? O-kay...Anyway that's a nice lead-in to another song that had my whole family confused. You may recall that we were the family who liked Jim Reeves because he pronounced every word of every song so clearly that they could be understood even on early monaural recordings. With one exception.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH1Y5E-XmDg

How exactly do the untold memories fade? We used to debate whether it sounded more like "fade, taboo" or "fade from view." We never thought of "fade to blue," which is what Google now offers. I still can't make up my mind, but I like "fade to blue."

Now we should all be confused enough for a lyrical nonsense poem:

You put me here in prison, and no doubt you're going to kill me.

You have driven me completely, even violently insane.

I went to eat an amanita, hoping it would fill me 

And distract me from your fickleness, which causes me such pain,

Or perhaps would be a deadly one and horribly would kill me--

But I ate some other mushroom, and it has destroyed my brain,

And I never will admit remembering how the choice did thrill me,

For then I'd lose my defense and be re-tried as being sane. 

(Who cares what the speaker did to whom? Has he not raved enough?)