A complete set of the library’s storytime videos:
www.youtube.com/user/FVRLvirtual
Here’s the horse. Here’s the sleigh.
Michele Taylor is getting ready for her performance of “Jingle Bells” — and there’s not a bar of soap in sight.
Taylor, a storyteller for the regional library system, recently teamed with producer Beth Townsend to record an online version of the holiday favorite. (Although it’s a beloved Christmas classic, the song actually was written for Thanksgiving.)
The 3½-minute video was added this month to the Fort Vancouver Regional Library’s Early Learning website.
In addition to pronouncing precisely, Taylor used some visual elements to help her young viewers figure out what she was talking — and singing — about.
Taylor set out her cast of characters: young passengers Jack and Jill, and Jay the horse. As she explained, it gives them an idea of what a one-horse open sleigh is.
And that’s trickier than it sounds. How many 7- or 8-year-olds have any concept of what those lyrics actually are? One of the people observing the filming session certainly didn’t when she was growing up.
“I thought it was ‘one horse, soap and sleigh,’ ” said Sue Vanlaanen, Fort Vancouver Regional Library District spokeswoman.
This led the discussion down a whole new path: the musical category of misunderstood song lyrics. Taylor even provided a proper name for the phenomenon.
“It’s called a ‘Lady Mondegreen,’ ” according to the storyteller. And fittingly, there is a story to be told. According to online resources, the reference was coined 60 years ago by author Sylvia Wright, who’d misunderstood the lyrics of an old Scottish ballad. To Wright’s ears, “They had slain the Earl of Moray, and Lady Mondegreen.”
It was years before she realized that there was only one victim, not two. In reality, “they had slain the Earl of Moray, and laid him on the green.”
These days, one of the most frequently cited examples is a phrase from the Jimi Hendrix classic, “Purple Haze.” The Seattle-born guitar wizard sang: ” ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky,” not ” ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”
Columbian reporter Scott Hewitt, who has done some songwriting and recording, said he once took a wrong turn on a Beatles lyric. In “Here, There and Everywhere,” Paul McCartney wrote: “And if she’s beside me, I know I need never care.”
What Hewitt heard was: “… I need Medicare.”
Sometimes you just figure it’s a word you don’t know. Stevie Mathieu, The Columbian’s assistant city editor, took that approach to the opening phrase of the national anthem as a youngster, when she sang about the donzerly light.
Vanlaanen had her own youthful misinterpretation of “The Star Spangled Banner.” But it made perfect sense when she was growing up in Milwaukee, Wis., before the Braves baseball team moved to Atlanta.
As the home-crowd sang the national anthem’s finale, Vanlaanen said she would belt out: “And the home of the Braves!” And then she wondered what the fans sang at other ball parks.
