Songs With Historical Errors In Their Lyrics

EXACTLY!

 

My first thought was this song. "War was never known"?? Don't think so, Neil. The Aztecs beat on their neighbors pretty viciously, which ultimately assisted Cortez in gathering native allies. Even if Cortez himself was indeed a grade A @$$hole. To see such hubris get rewarded with success is always hard.

 

FWIW, it took me until 2005 (over 20 years after "Pride" came out) to realize that "early morning April 4" in "Pride...." was inaccurate.

I learned the actual time (early evening) when I visited the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis (where MLK was shot).
There was (and still is?) an excellent Civil Rights museum in that building. As you go along the hallways, you are going through a timeline of civil rights events.
When you get to MLK's murder, you are looking right into the room where he was standing when it happened.

 

Close enough to God providing manna for the Israelites in the desert. Easy to imagine there were rocks and stones, not just sand a la the Sahara.

 

When I visited Memphis in 2011, the extensive Civil Rights Museum was located across the street from the Lorraine Motel. The motel did have the room Dr. King stayed in still available for viewing (from the outside — complete with ashtrays with cigarette butts in them, etc.). You could walk up on the second floor catwalk and peer into it.

But the displays were in the museum across the street. They were sobering for sure.

 

Man certainly co-existed with some of the giant mammals ~ which is what you see in the cave paintings, Zimbabwe and elsewhere. (We even still have rhinos...barely ) But not dinosaurs, which were specifically the giant reptiles. A very different climate allowed dinosaurs to thrive when they did and only then.

Of course, coelacanths were thought to be extinct for millions of years when rediscovered in the 20th century. So it's always intriguing to imagine a remote family of Brontosaurus, or a giant sea-reptile (the Loch Ness Monster) surviving into our time. But no evidence I'm aware of suggests that. Not sure which biblical passages you're referencing, but seems other large creatures apart from dinosaurs might easily account for those stories.

 

Maybe JRR was referring to the early winter (January/February) of 1865? And as 'April' wouldn't scan for the verses, he used May, but it's still factually accurate (ie, by May of 1865, Richmond had fallen). The bad grammar bothers me more than the bad history!

 

I've always pictured it as the general in exactly this vein.

 

Maybe it has changed. I was there in the summer of 2005.

At the time I was there, you were not able to go over to (the building) where the assassin fired the rifle. I have heard that you can now go over there. As that is "across the street" from the Lorraine Motel, maybe that is where the museum is now? As I recall, the "assassin's building" was to the west of the motel.

My experience with that room where MLK was staying in --- was that when we got to the point where we were looking into that room, we were looking into it through plexiglass/whatever from the side of the room. Side best explained as follows. If you are standing in front of the room and looking into it, we were looking into it through plexiglass/whatever that had replaced the wall that would have been to your right. Explained differently -- if MLK had stood up in the room next to (or in front of) the bed and looked out the room's door, the wall we were looking through would have been to his left.

=================
Side note about that trip --- We were on vacation from DC area in summer 2005. Had flown to New Orleans, spent time there, then drove up to Memphis, spent a few days there, then drove back to New Orleans for return flight. Only mentioning this because Katrina happened in New Orleans only about a month after we were there.

 

Dropkick Murphys:

In Pittsburgh they called us closed minded,
But we know that's simply not true.
Yeah, we're touchy, feely, sensitive guys,
I ain't ashamed I cried when Micky died in Rocky 2!

As all true students of history are aware, Micky died in "Rocky III".

(This is addressed in the liner notes, so they knew and went with the easy rhyme.)

 

I Stole A Bride by sometime indie-darlings Hefner plays with the imagery of the Trojan wars (and Helen, obviously) in its lyrics. But a critical bit of the song goes “and those big clipper ships, they’re coming straight for me”.

Clipper Ships were ultra-fast 19th century sailing ships, the pinnacle of tall-ship technology before steam took over - think The Cutty Sark. Ancient Greeks would have been in primarily oar-driven galleys, biremes or triremes.

This makes me sound like a pillock. It’s a great song otherwise.

 

It's just about possible that they were referring to birds, which are the descendants of dinosaurs, but as that involves evolution...

 

A friend of mine wrote his own song about the MLK shooting, with the line "a cool spring Memphis evening." So I knew either he or Bono had their facts wrong....

 

Yes, the museum had moved across the street by the time I visited, and IIRC it encompassed the very spot from which James Earl Ray fired his shots at Dr. King.

Your description of his room at the Lorraine Motel matches my recollection, including the plexiglas wall.

 

In the original Sad Song demo by Lou Reed, performed by The Velvet Underground, there is mention of Mary Queen of Scots, the year 1493 and Henry V. None of which really adds up to anything, historically – as neither person was alive in that year nor were they both even from the same era. But maybe they are just a disconnected bunch of dates, people and symbols that stand for something wistfully romantic in Lou Reed's forlorn-sounding song.

Living on borrowed time
And I'm in love with Mary Queen of Scots
1493, and everything's like it should be
I'm going to stop wasting my time
Henry V would have broken my arms

Sad song... sad song...

Living on borrowed time
I'm in love with Mary Queen of Scots
1493, and things are like they ought to be
Primose and kilts
Primrose and Spain
Forget-me-not, my Queen of Scots

Sad song... sad song...

 

Likewise, there's no "south Detroit" despite what Journey might have you believin'.

 

There's no "South Detroit" (as in an area that is commonly known by that name to Detroit residents) but if you were in Detroit and went to the southernmost part of the city, you'd be in south Detroit.

 

Sebastian knew the future. Shelby Singleton moved the label to Nashville in the early 70's.

 

Yeah, once when I got nailed in the head with a baseball I told people it got me in the "north body."

 

Come on, that's hardly the same thing... people don't commonly use directional terms to refer to their bodies, whereas they pretty much always use those terms to describe geography.

I do get what you're saying. I live in West Seattle. There is no "East Seattle" in the sense that there's no area of town that people here refer to by that name. But if I headed east until I reached the edge of Lake Washington, I'd be in east Seattle, as in "the eastern part of Seattle." It is true that the lyrics of Journey's song betray ignorance of the local vernacular of Detroit. But to me the more annoying thing about that song is the excessive overuse of slant rhyme. I hate slant rhyme. It just says to me "I'm too lazy to think of two words that actually do rhyme."

 

How about a geographical error? “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show mentions heading “west from the Cumberland Gap to Johnson City, Tennessee.” Johnson City is actually over 100 miles east of the Gap.

 

That's right after the line "had a nice long toke", so maybe they just had their map upside down.

 

Good point!

 

I don't know, man. Take a look at the map:

Google Maps

There's only a tiny portion of the city that extends significantly more southerly than the rest of the city, and if you were going to refer to that by a map direction, you'd probably call it "Southwest Detroit" (and in fact, there's a label on the map that says exactly that, near the Ambassador Bridge).

Other than that "South Detroit" is just Windsor, Ontario.

 

Or possibly nearly 25000 miles west.