By Tim Sanders

A curious reader named Clark Newton e-mailed me last Tuesday, asking just what I meant by my statement in that week’s column about "a bomb, like the one in Gilead Mom and Dad used to sing about in church." Well, I could pretend I was suffering from low blood sugar when I wrote that, but that is not the case. Let me explain.

When I was a kid, the old Negro spiritual "There is a Balm in Gilead" was popular. In church that is, not necessarily on Your Hit Parade. (That, and carbon dating, should give you some clue as to my current age.) The point is that as a very small child, I often misinterpreted song lyrics. The line, "There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul" sounded like "There is a bomb in Gilead, to heal the skinflint’s hole" to me. I had no idea what it meant, but from what I could gather there was a place called Gilead which had already been or was about to be blown to smithereens by a bomb, and good Christians should steer clear of that place.

That misinterpretation of song lyrics is known as a "mondegreen." The term "mondegreen" came from Sylvia Wright in a 1954 article in Harper’s Magazine, where she described how as a youngster she misheard the last lines of a 17th Century ballad called "The Bonnie Earl O’Murray." which her mother often read to her. What she heard was:

Oh, where hae ye been?

They hae slain the Earl O’Murray

And Lady Mondegreen.

That actual last line, however, was "And laid him on the green." Sylvia gave other examples of mondegreens in her essay, including one of my favorites: "Haffely, gaffely, gaffely gonward," which she extrapolated from Tennyson’s lines "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward!" from "The Charge of the Light Brigade."

And when it comes to the old hymns of the faith, there are mondegreens a’plenty. One of my childhood friends could belt out "A Mighty Forklift is our God," without a hint of self-consciousness. I’m sure his forklift deity was every bit as reasonable to him as my Gilead bomb was to me.

One of the problems was that even in those paleolithic times, the old hymns used archaic terms which made little sense to those of us under 90. Even the Doxology lent itself to misinterpretation. "Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise him all preachers, here we go!" made perfectly good sense to us. And of course there were those blessed hymns, "Up from the Gravy a Rose," "I am Fine, O Lord," and "Rescue the Parachute." And since not one kid in a thousand knew what a sheaf was, and few adults had ever seen one, there seemed no reason for us to come rejoicing, bringing in a whole load of something or other with which we were unfamiliar. So you’d hear "Bringing in the Sheep," "Bringing in the Sheets," or even "Bringing in the Cheese," depending on the singer’s denomination.

Other sacred mondegreens include these, many of which are probably familiar to you:

"Jesus Loves me, this I know, forty Bibles tell me so"

"Just as I am, without one flea"

"Andy walks with me, Andy talks with me"

"And you’ll find a little chocolate Jesus makes it right"

"Gladly, the cross-eyed bear"

"Lead on O kinky turtle"

And we shouldn’t forget the Christmas songs, such as "Joy to the World" (not the Jeremiah was a Bullfrog one) with the lines:

"Joy to the World, the Lord has gum. Let earth’s receiver ring."

Or "Silent Night," with the inspiring words: "Round John version, moderate child." These only remind us of those other fine anthems,"While Shepherds Washed their Socks by Night" and "We Three Kings of Oregon Are."And what list of holiday mondegreens would be complete without "Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire?" Yum.

Not that there aren’t plenty of old pop tunes with confusing lyrics. Take the ancient Herman’s Hermits song, "She’s a Must to Avoid," which for years I heard as "She’s a Muscular Boy." In 1965 the Sir Douglas Quintet had a hit with "She’s About a Mover," which sounded suspiciously like "She’s a Bottom Hoover" to us unsophisticated teenagers. And the Beatles’ "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" contained the odd phrase "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes." A whole generation (or my friend Frank Richter and I, anyway) interpreted that as "the girl with colitis goes by." And of course if a muscular, bottom-hooving girl with colitis had gone by, then the mangled line "there’s a bathroom on the right" from Credence Clearwater Revival’s "Bad Moon Rising" would have told us all just where she was headed. (CCR, by the way, also gave us "I wanna know, have you ever seen Loraine?")

We won’t even mention "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly. The band performed that tricky mondegreen procedure themselves with a rusty butter knife and only local anesthesia. If you want to know what the original title to that self-inflicted mondegreen was, listen to the Richard Harris version of "MacArthur Park." A lot of baby boomers have married, lived productive lives, raised children, bounced grandchildren on their knees, and finally died of natural causes waiting for that song to end. So even if you should survive MacArthur Park, by the time it is over you’ll have forgotten all about "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida."

(And no, the actual title is not "I’m the God of Velveeta.")