76 trombones
GrapeApe
..And sweet fragrant meadows of dawn and ..
Dew?
You?
It is not uncommon for songwriters to take advantage of the ambiguity created
by homophones sometimes created by other nearby words.
Is there a name for this? (without getting into a discussion of mondegreens)
John Smith
>
> Paul McCartney sings a Meridith Wilson song thusly: <...>
Meredith, not Meridith. Willson, not Wilson.
Maria Conlon
John Smith wrote
>>
>> Paul McCartney sings a Meridith Wilson song thusly: <...>
>
>Meredith, not Meridith. Willson, not Wilson.
I'm glad Grapesy got the McCartney bit right. (He did, didn't he?)
And by the way, I think PM sings "dew."
Maria
Mike Barnes
>Paul McCartney sings a Meridith Wilson song thusly:
>
>..And sweet fragrant meadows of dawn and ..
>
>Dew?
>You?
>
>It is not uncommon for songwriters to take advantage of the ambiguity created
>by homophones sometimes created by other nearby words.
Have you any reason to believe that that's what happened?
Another example might be Jimi Hendrix's "kiss the sky" / "kiss this guy".
--
Mike Barnes
R H Draney
news:Q1aXMVCa...@senrab.com:
> In alt.usage.english, GrapeApe <grap...@aol.comjunk> wrote
>>Paul McCartney sings a Meridith Wilson song thusly:
>>
>>..And sweet fragrant meadows of dawn and ..
>>
>>Dew?
>>You?
This is the same song where Sir Paul sang "I never sore them
winging"?...
>>It is not uncommon for songwriters to take advantage of the
>>ambiguity created by homophones sometimes created by other nearby
>>words.
>
> Have you any reason to believe that that's what happened?
Maybe the Ape is being influenced by Paul's (or John's?) lyric:
It won't be long
Till I belong to you.
That's a *glorious* example of lyrical ambiguity...I only wish that my
own:
The times I've waited here for you
...
It's worth the wait in gold.
...could come close....
> Another example might be Jimi Hendrix's "kiss the sky" / "kiss
> this guy".
No, that's just a mondegreen...Hendrix no more intended "kiss this
guy" (or "juice this guy", a minority interpretation supposedly
referring to intravenous drug use) than John Fogerty wanted us to
believe that "there's a bathroom on the right"....r
Donna Richoux
> Paul McCartney sings a Meridith Wilson song thusly:
>
> ..And sweet fragrant meadows of dawn and ..
>
> Dew?
> You?
I used to wonder if it was even "hue."
It comes, of course, from the 1957 musical "The Music Man."
I'm sure it must be "dew" but the Web is at its worst when it comes to
verifying actual wording of quotes. Unless you can find an authoritative
site, all you find are lots of people publishing their guesses, and
quoting one another. Does anyone own sheet music for this?
In sheer numbers, there are more Web hits for "sweet fragrant meadows of
dawn and you" than there are for "sweet fragrant meadows of dawn and
dew," but we've seen other quotes where the erroneous version
outnumbered the correct version.
This one is a correlational nightmare, what with the spelling variants
of "Meredith," "Willson," "Til/Till/'Til" and then the "and dew/and
you" phrase. For what it's worth, I found a few sites that publish all
the lyrics from "The Music Man" and that also spell "Meredith Willson"
correctly, and *they* say "dawn and dew." Nobody who fit that
description said "dawn and you".
For example,
The Music Man Online! - Songs Text
http://www.themusicmanonline.com/Songs/SongsText.htm
> It is not uncommon for songwriters to take advantage of the ambiguity created
> by homophones sometimes created by other nearby words.
>
> Is there a name for this? (without getting into a discussion of mondegreens)
I think you are hearing a simple glitch on the part of the singer.
Nothing intentional either on McCartney's part nor Willson's part.
--
Best -- Donna Richoux
R H Draney
news:1fcam4j.ph68fh1o0hfjmN%tr...@euronet.nl:
> This one is a correlational nightmare, what with the spelling
> variants of "Meredith," "Willson," "Til/Till/'Til" and then the
> "and dew/and you" phrase. For what it's worth, I found a few sites
> that publish all the lyrics from "The Music Man" and that also
> spell "Meredith Willson" correctly, and *they* say "dawn and dew."
> Nobody who fit that description said "dawn and you".
>
> For example,
> The Music Man Online! - Songs Text
> http://www.themusicmanonline.com/Songs/SongsText.htm
I was impressed by
http://libretto.musicals.ru/show_text.php?text=musicman , a page whose
official title is "Kollektsiya Tekstov i Libretto Myuziklov"...if
*they* can get it right, why can't the others?...I'm considering
supplying them the lyrics for "Pick a Little, Talk a Little /
Goodnight Ladies" which they say are unavailable....
My niece the doctor would be a good one to answer this question...she
played Marian Paroo when she lived in Santa Barbara and had the entire
script (not just her own role) memorized even years later...my gift to
her when she started college was three appropriately ancient-looking
volumes of classic literature, packed so as to emerge from the box in
the order: Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac; she caught the reference
immediately....r
GrapeApe
>I think you are hearing a simple glitch on the part of the singer.
>Nothing intentional either on McCartney's part nor Willson's part.
How could you be sure Donna?
I know some songwriters. They are aware, at least after having written a song,
of the ambiguity that can be imparted by homophones. They usually keep them in
rather than write them out. Let the listener paint his own picture. Its at
least as common as allowing the last word of the previous line work as the
first word of the next line.
And I see singers play with the ambiguity as they are singing. They know a
double entendre can occur. They may telegraph this to the audience.
Donna Richoux
[I had said:]
> >
> >I think you are hearing a simple glitch on the part of the singer.
> >Nothing intentional either on McCartney's part nor Willson's part.
>
> How could you be sure Donna?
I'm not, which is why I started with "I think." If I was sure, I would
have said something else. I suppose there are people who preface
everything they are certain about with "I think..." but I don't believe
I'm one of them. Ayn Rand was very cross with people who said things
like "I think two plus two is four" and I tend to agree with her on
that.
One thing that leads me to the opinion up top is that my family owned
the Broadway musical LP when I was small and so I heard that version
(Barbara Cook?) before I heard Paul McCartney's. Although the memory is
dim, I believe I only experienced doubt about that line when I heard the
Beatle version, not Cook's. That's so long ago, I can't remember exactly
what I felt, doubt or annoyance or what, but I noticed something. I
think he gets another word wrong somewhere, too. It's a lovely song,
though.
> I know some songwriters. They are aware, at least after having written a
> song, of the ambiguity that can be imparted by homophones. They usually
> keep them in rather than write them out. Let the listener paint his own
> picture. Its at least as common as allowing the last word of the previous
> line work as the first word of the next line.
>
> And I see singers play with the ambiguity as they are singing. They know a
> double entendre can occur. They may telegraph this to the audience.
I can imagine a songwriter noticing some lyric was hard to understand,
because of the sequence of words, but deciding to let it go because it
was too late in the day, and it didn't constitute a big enough problem
to fuss with. That sounds like a bit of the same thing.
Maria Conlon
R H Draney wrote
>My niece the doctor would be a good one to answer this
question...she
>played Marian Paroo when she lived in Santa Barbara and had the
entire
>script (not just her own role) memorized even years later...my gift
to
>her when she started college was three appropriately
ancient-looking
>volumes of classic literature, packed so as to emerge from the box
in
>the order: Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac; she caught the reference
>immediately....r
And did she entertain everyone then by pronouncing the names as
Hermione did? (There was no doubt what she thought of them, was
there? Especially Baaaallzac.)
What a neat idea the gift was, r.
Maria
R H Draney
news:ac1k68$livd3$1...@ID-113669.news.dfncis.de:
> R H Draney wrote
>
>>...three appropriately ancient-looking
>>volumes of classic literature, packed so as to emerge from the box
>>in the order: Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac; she caught the reference
>>immediately....r
>
> And did she entertain everyone then by pronouncing the names as
> Hermione did? (There was no doubt what she thought of them, was
> there? Especially Baaaallzac.)
I think we all (her parents, her grandmother, and my then-girlfriend)
did the pronunciation...Amanda anticipated the third author by the
time she had the second one out of the box...(by the way, the kid's
not only a genius, she's a dead ringer for Natalie Portman...brains
*and* looks; needless to say she's not technically my blood
relative)....
> What a neat idea the gift was, r.
In my pre-Amazon days, the hardest part was finding a leatherbound
copy of "Gargantua and Pantagruel"....r
R H Draney
> GrapeApe <grap...@aol.comjunk> wrote:
>
>> How could you be sure Donna?
>
> I'm not, which is why I started with "I think." If I was sure, I
> would have said something else. I suppose there are people who
> preface everything they are certain about with "I think..." but I
> don't believe I'm one of them. Ayn Rand was very cross with people
> who said things like "I think two plus two is four" and I tend to
> agree with her on that.
Very Japanese, that...one of the things that always strikes me about
J-pop literature is that nobody ever says "I want some fish", it's
always "I am thinking that the situation might be that I could
conceivably want some fish"....
> One thing that leads me to the opinion up top is that my family
> owned the Broadway musical LP when I was small and so I heard that
> version (Barbara Cook?) before I heard Paul McCartney's. Although
> the memory is dim, I believe I only experienced doubt about that
> line when I heard the Beatle version, not Cook's. That's so long
> ago, I can't remember exactly what I felt, doubt or annoyance or
> what, but I noticed something. I think he gets another word wrong
> somewhere, too. It's a lovely song, though.
Not unless you're talking about that "I never soar them winging"
business...I just popped in the CD and checked...the first time
through, the questionable line is almost certainly "dawn and dew"...on
the repeat after the instrumental break, the stop is much less
pronounced and could more easily be taken as "dawn and you"....
I did a little clipping and extracted the line from each place for
comparison....
first time: http://home.earthlink.net/~dadoctah/dawnanddew.mp3
second time: http://home.earthlink.net/~dadoctah/dawnandyou.mp3
GrapeApe
>because of the sequence of words, but deciding to let it go because it
>was too late in the day, and it didn't constitute a big enough problem
>to fuss with. That sounds like a bit of the same thing.
But you don't think they would actually want ambiguity, or at times, double
entendre?
Perhaps not so much in some Braodway librettos, which may be a part of a
narrative, but I don't consider ambiguity necessarily equivalent with laziness
in other song styles.
I would think they often strive for such. The more ways a song can be possibly
interpreted, the more listeners that connect with it. A common lesson in many
"improve your songwriting" books is to edit lyrics to become less precise and
personal, and make them more universal in scope. This may indeed lead to verse
that is more ambiguous, and open to individual interpretation. If they were
looking for precision uber alles, they could use words that did not even rhyme.
Robert Lipton
GrapeApe wrote:
Mr. Willson was too old and wily a hand at songwriting to rhyme a word
with itself.
Bob
Tony Cooper
> Mr. Willson was too old and wily a hand at songwriting to
rhyme a word
> with itself.
I think I can rhyme a word with "itself":
In the grotto of my garden,
'Neath a mossy, rocky shelf,
Lived an impish little creature;
A mischievous little elf.
He spent his days in frolic,
Like a proper little elf.
But spent the night ecstatically,
Playing with himself.
--
Tony Cooper aka: Tony_Co...@Yahoo.com
Provider of Jots & Tittles
rzed
"R H Draney" <dado...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:Xns9210BF6C...@207.217.77.26...
I have no sound card on this computer, so I can't check these out, but
I'm supposing PM must have said "dyew" rather than "doo" (shuffles
through some Fontana posts) -- that is, /dju/ rather than /du/ -- or
the ambiguity couldn't easily arise. Some have said that his accent
has become more Yankified over time; I wonder whether he'd pronounce
the lines the same way today?
rzed
"Tony Cooper" <tony_co...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:ac1t75$m42ns$1...@ID-113505.news.dfncis.de...
Which suggests (I was going to say 'raises', but ...) a question:
does, say, "himself" rhyme with "itself"? I mean, in a sense it does,
but the last syllable in each word is identical. Is that a rhyme or a
repeated syllable? In a case like that -- and especially as the
syllable is unaccented -- doesn't it seem that the rhyme pattern would
have to extend farther back? To my ear, "cold elf" and "old self"
would rhyme, and possibly "cold elf" and "old elf" would be
acceptable, but "old elf" and "dusty elf" don't really qualify (though
"old elf" and "bookshelf" would). Is this sense of rhyme mine alone?
R H Draney
news:ac2r8o$fb1$1...@mailgate2.lexis-nexis.com:
> I have no sound card on this computer, so I can't check these out,
> but I'm supposing PM must have said "dyew" rather than "doo"
> (shuffles through some Fontana posts) -- that is, /dju/ rather
> than /du/ -- or the ambiguity couldn't easily arise. Some have
> said that his accent has become more Yankified over time; I wonder
> whether he'd pronounce the lines the same way today?
"Fragrant meadows of dawn and doo" conjures up an entirely different
image, one not really appropriate to the tone of the song....r
rzed
Good point. [Wipes coffee from monitor]
I have to say, though, that "rich, fragrant meadows" tend to become so
for that reason. What the heck *is* a meadow of dawn and dew, by the
way?
Donna Richoux
That's a good point. And think about the logic. The singer is saying
s/he never noticed all this stuff until "you" were around. If the "you"
was in the meadow with the dawn and the fragance and all, then why would
the singer have failed to notice?
GrapeApe
"sweet fragrant meadows of dawn and you". about 237.
"sweet fragrant meadows of dawn and dew". about 111.
"Dew" goes with the meadow imagery of the verse, but
"You" goes with the main obsession of the singer. Its as if a train of thought
was interupted with a sigh.
Oh girl....