Songs With Historical Errors In Their Lyrics

Already stated,
A steamboat can go to Tennessee.
Read about Ft. Donnelson, Shiloh.
Reading books, etc. helps..

Also as stated, the lyrics may just indicate a post war visit....

 

Lennon moved Christmas into the new year ....so this is Christmas and what have we done , another year over and a new one just BEGUN !

 

Geographical inaccuracy in Roger Whittaker's Durham Town. The dozy spunktrumpet tells us about sitting on the banks of the River Tyne. Durham is on the Wear

 

Aberfan wasn't really a mining disaster in the sense implied in the song - it was much worse. Granted it might have inspired the song though.

 

The Who's 'I've Known No War':

"On the nineteenth day of a spring day in May, Albert Speer was deleted"

No such event happened... but Pete WAS born on May 19, 1945.

 

'Englishman Donegan' was Scottish, by the way. An apt mistake in a thread about inaccuracies!

 

Maps are cool, too.

 

I have the two-CD "All the Hits"collection, and it still says Liverpool there.

 

Our good friends at Wikipedia share with us that:

On March 19, 1945, Hitler issued his Nero Decree, ordering a scorched earth policy in both Germany and the occupied territories. Hitler's order, by its terms, deprived Speer of any power to interfere with the decree.

Speer's time in office ended on May 23, 1945, 4 days after Pete's birth.

Not quite "deletion", but Pete wasn't just making stuff up.

 

The Edmund Fitzgerald was destined for Detroit (specifically the steel mills of Zug Island), not Cleveland.

Also "a musty old hall in Dee-TROY-it" (actually the Mariners' Church) is not how Dee-TROYT is pronounced. It must be a rural Canadian thing, as I've only heard this pronunciation from CBC hockey announcers and this song.

 

The Mamas and The Papas - Creeque Alley
"When Cass was a sophomore, planned to go to Swarthmore, but she changed her mind one day."

This is a rather oblique reference to Cass' on-again, off-again educational career. She was a very intelligent young woman (an IQ of 165) whose uncles were mostly doctors, and her parents planned for her to go to medical school. But she discovered show business during her last year in high school and dropped out two weeks before graduating. A few years later, with her career not exactly catching fire yet, she attended American University in Washington, D.C. (on the strength of her SAT scores and on a provisional basis since she didn't have a diploma). She did not reach her sophomore year by any means - by her own admission, she couldn't stay away from the drama department and kept hanging around there instead of concentrating on whatever it that was supposed to be her major - and she planned to continue at Goucher College (a female college near her home in Baltimore), not Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania (www.swarthmore.edu) , but apparently John Phillips couldn't make a rhyme out of "provisional freshman" and "Goucher." In any case, she dropped out again and went back to singing after a only few weeks.

 

Of course it isn't. It's pronounced the way my late stepdad (RIP) pronounced it: DEE-troyt

 

As a Durham native that one has wound me up for so many years...

And it's A CITY! Not a town...

 

Cotton Fields Beach Boys/Leadbelly

It was back in Louisiana
Just about a mile from Texarkana

Would need a strong pair of boots to walk that mile in!

 

Agreed. The useless balloon knot

 

Thanks...Easy to make errors when you don’t fact check your work! You would think that after watching all 3 seasons of Outlander this summer I should recognize a Scottish name.

 

Classic error!!

 

Lonnie Donegan either got the words wrong or deliberately changed them to recast the song from a British perspective. The original song by Jimmy Driftwood and the hit cover version by Johnny Horton both say "Along with Colonel Jackson", but they both set the battle in the year 1814. The original version contains a verse that goes:
"The French said, 'Andrew, you had better run
'Cause Packenham's a-comin' with a bullet in his gun.
Hickory said that he didn't give a damn.
He was gonna whoop the britches off of Colonel Packenham."
Johnny Horton omitted that verse and 2 other verses because of the word "damn" and because the extra verses would have pushed the song over the 4-minute mark. Both would have restricted the song's chances of airplay in 1959.

 

Whatever happened to
Leon Trotsky?
He got an ice pick
That made his ears burn
(c) Stranglers

Well, it was ice axe ))).

 

As mentioned in another post, Billy Joel's "The Ballad of Billy the Kid" is loaded with inaccuracies, most blatantly at the end where it says Billy the Kid was hung. He was shot. Good song with lots of atmosphere, but maybe Billy Joel should have checked the encyclopedia before writing it.

 

If Bob said it; it must be true! John Wesley had it wrong.

 

That's what I always took that line to mean.

 

It would have to be. The Robert E. Lee was known as "the Monarch of the Mississippi." However it wasn't built until 1866.

Robert E. Lee (steamboat) - Wikipedia

 

Right, but going back the possibility that it was the general and not the boat, he could have traveled to Tennessee after the war (I have no idea whether he did).

 

There's a funny introduction during the Russian tour where explains that this is completely made up and totally false.

The verse probably should've been:

One cold day Pat Garrett caught up with Billy
And the lawman gunned him down for what he did
Then the townsfolk and their kin,
Like the sea came pouring in,
To watch...the burying...of Billy the Kid...

But it's more than a little clunky.