Last weekend Les Oman was over in Ballycastle, from Campbeltown, singing songs in the Smugglers Inn & promoting the Ferry Link, but I digress, before I even got started (is that possible?!)
Anyway, he told me of a French Band who once introduced a Reel as: "My Son's a Prawn" - Mason's Apron
Don't know if this tune traces back to Ireland, maybe just to Appalachia, but a newspaper account said a friend of mine plays Pluck Old Hen (actually Cluck Old Hen). I howled when I read it.
You might be talking about mondegreens actually. The term was coined by SF columnist, Jon Carroll when he received a letter from someone who said they had wondered since childhood who Lady Mondegreen was. There was a lyric in an old Scottish song where someone was killed along with this Lady Mondegreen, but she wasn't mentioned in any other part of the song. When the letter writer found a book of Scottish songs at a garage sale she quickly turned to the song and read, "They slayed him and laid him on the green." Hence the term, "mondegreen".
Now he has a column devoted to these every year. One of the best-known mondegreens is from a Jimmy Hendrix song, "Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky" that was heard as,"Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy".
A couple of good ones happened at our local session as well. Someone asked us what tune we just played and we told him it was "Finbar Dwyer's". He came back the next week and asked us if we would play that tune "Thin Barbwire." Same thing happened when a bodhrán player asked us for the name of "The Ormand Sound". Next time he showed up he asked if we would play "The Armless Hand."
There's a tune on a Johnny Doherty album called Easter Snows, which is an English mis-hearing of an Irish place name, as I recall. But it got transformed further into Esther's Nose, and Doherty even had a story about who Esther was.
Jack, I've got the tune to that old Scottish song, it's only 12 bars in 3/4 so it's something that could be played around with for improvisation and extensions. I think I'll post it.
Trevor
Dave, I believe I've seen "Thirla Murray" in print as "The Earl of Murray", the person whom the Scottish song was about. Yet another superb mondegreen!
BTW, I've just submitted the tune of that Scottish song.
Trevor
Forty odd years ago, when my dad came back from a few months working in Australia, and I was only knee high to a grasshopper, he used to often be heard singing a song with chorus which demanded "What's in the Tilden?"
It was years later that I found out what was in the Tilden.
we were doing this at the Seattle Irish Pipers Club tionol; "If you're drunk, is it sex that you want" for "if you're sick is it tea that you want". Must have been the beer. Had a great time in Seattle-hmmm, Piping in Seattle.
Several years ago after Willie Week I was in a B&B in Ennis for a couple of days. There was a piper from Japan staying there as well, so we decided to play a few tunes together. He says to me "Do you know Crifzo Mohair?" I said, "No, I don't, but play a bit of it anyway." He launched into the tune and I said "Oh! Cliffs of Moher!"
Another one I've heard, although this may be apochryphal, is that there was some German guy who, when referring to Vincent Broderick's tune The Flagstone of Memories, instead called it Memories of Flagstones. (I've forgotten more flagstones than you'll ever know, buster!)
A tangential mondegreen occurred at our sesh the other week. Rob had been clearing a loft and had found a french book of dots from about 25 years back. It has some pretty little tunes in. It is called the Massif Central tunebook. I suggested he should get a very large photocopy done, and place it in the middle of the room.
Speaking of Seamus Begley, that reminds me of how he introduced a set of tunes at a concert at the Feakle Festival last year. It was something like this: "Now this is a set of tunes we call Johnny O'Leary's. But actually, Johnny didn't call them that, he called them Julia Clifford's. But Julia Clifford, come to think of it, she called them Denis Murphy's. And Dennis Murphy, by God, he called them Padraig O'Keeffe's. And Padraig O'Keeffe, he called them...let me think now...Polkas. So there you are..."
A slightly more tangential mondegreen is the story of the small boy who attended his grandfather's funeral. Back at the house the family were having the sandwiches and tea and someone spotted the little lad playing in the garden. He had dug a hole and was busy kicking his teddy bear into it, chanting "in the name of the father and of the son and in the 'ole 'e goes", as he was doing it.
Trevor
LOL @ these... this thread comes up often enough, the one I like that someone else posted was thinking that 'Ceol Rince na hÉireann' were laundry directions, Cool Rinse & Iron.
it's not a garbled tune name, but this seems to fit the thread:
in the very late 70s, i had an irish music program on a community radio station in california. i frequently got requests for to play stuff by the 'barfy band.'
I was playing a tune with a young lady the other night who innocently enquired if it was alright for her to go down while I stayed up. I really tried hard not to snigger...
There's the Old Hooker song they play before the rugby in Scotland "Awful hoor of Scotland".
Last St Patrick's Day, I was in Kazakhstan, and the Kazakh-Russian bar manager asked me if the Irish people in the bar would sing her favourite Irish song "Three Birds Fly". As in, "Where once we watched ..."
Surprise, surprise! I've been keeping a list over the past six months or so. Most are originals, but a bunch of them I've jotted down after seeing them here or hearing them from some musician or other. A few of them have actual tunes that go with them.
Commitment is Hell
Napoleon Crossing His Eyes
Napoleon Crossing His Fingers
Napoleon Crossing His T’s
Mug of Coors Light
Back She Comes
Toss the Cookies
Kitty’s Litter
Haste to Divorce Court
Hag With The Money, You Have Killed Me at the Churn
Humors of Secaucus
Smell of the Refinery
Maid in Taiwan
Pernod Before Dinner
Stack of What?
The Duke’s Loveseat
Colonel Mustard’s
Earl Catsup’s
The Maid Behind Bars
The Maid Behind the Bra
The Barmaid's Behind
Mickey Chewing the Fat
Mickey Chewing Tobacco
Mickey Eschewing Bubblegum
Ed Meese in the Bog
Swallow Ale Jig
Earn More of the Bucks
Planxty Joe Average
Santa’s Reel
Go Ask My Boss
The Humours of Seinfeld
The Barney Program
PC’s in Winter
Malls of Liz Carroll
A Kiss for a Date
Floss the Tethers
The Home Schooler
Old Hag, You Have Billed Me
The Great Waltz of China
The Balls of Liz Carroll
I don't get on this site often enough, so I'm late in the game with my answer...I first heard of mondegrens on an old album called Jean Ritchie and Oscar Brand live at ..? City Hall I think it was, and Oscar told the story. That must have been from the early 50's, the album was owned originally by my late in-laws, and my wife brought it over with her from New York 26 years ago.....so they are at least that old....
I was close, but incorrect. Here's how the whole "mondegreen thing went down in John Carroll's own words:
As a child, the writer Sylvia Wright heard a plaintive Scottish ballad titled ``The Bonny Earl of Murray.'' One stanza, she believed, went like this:
Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands/ Oh Where hae you been?/ They hae slay the Earl of Murray/ And Lady Mondegreen.
How romantic, she thought, Lady Mondegreen perishing with her lord in the fierce, romantic wars of medieval Scotland. It was only much later that she realized that they had actually slain the Earl of Murray and ``laid him on the green.''
She began to collect similar mishearings of song lyrics, poems, patriotic utterances and the like, and in 1954 published a small article about them, coining the word ``mondegreen.'' Then she died and 30 years passed and, voila, a columnist in San Francisco discovered the term and founded a small cottage industry -- the collection and dissemination of mondegreens.
I also have a copy of Jean Ritchie and Oscar Brand at Town Hall in New York (so I am at least that old, too...)
I remember Oscar telling the Mondegren story as between-song 'patter'. Well, it bombed, apparently nobody in the concert audience 'got it', so the engineer spliced a few seconds of audience laughter in the final recording. Spliced - as in razor blade, this was the 1950s, no fades, just - silence then "Hahahah" then silence. I always remember that.
I could swear I was at a session once where someone asked if anyone knew a hornpipe called: The Rights of the Fairies. Add it to the list...
My Son's a Prawn
My Son's a Prawn
Last weekend Les Oman was over in Ballycastle, from Campbeltown, singing songs in the Smugglers Inn & promoting the Ferry Link, but I digress, before I even got started (is that possible?!)
Anyway, he told me of a French Band who once introduced a Reel as: "My Son's a Prawn" - Mason's Apron
Anyone out there do any better??
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by Ptarmigan
Re: My Son's a Prawn
well i was studying at a summer school in stirling once and this band were playing and they introduced their next number as
whistle over the lavatory - whistle o'er the lave o't
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by aye
Re: My Son's a Prawn
actually yours is better
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by aye
Re: My Son's a Prawn
You mean like the rare and expensive make of violin, made by Lavatori?
Jim
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by Worldfiddler
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Loan us some blow, man.
Oft requested, usually refused, just like the tune.
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by Conán McDonnell
Re: My Son's a Prawn
My favorite is still My Darling A Sheep. David, we always sang that one "with a yo, ho! Blow the man down" and it was a pirate song!
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by Zina Lee
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Don't know if this tune traces back to Ireland, maybe just to Appalachia, but a newspaper account said a friend of mine plays Pluck Old Hen (actually Cluck Old Hen). I howled when I read it.
Carol
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by carolsviolin
Re: My Son's a Prawn
"Athol Highlanders" anyone?
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by bellows boy
Re: My Son's a Prawn
You might be talking about mondegreens actually. The term was coined by SF columnist, Jon Carroll when he received a letter from someone who said they had wondered since childhood who Lady Mondegreen was. There was a lyric in an old Scottish song where someone was killed along with this Lady Mondegreen, but she wasn't mentioned in any other part of the song. When the letter writer found a book of Scottish songs at a garage sale she quickly turned to the song and read, "They slayed him and laid him on the green." Hence the term, "mondegreen".
Now he has a column devoted to these every year. One of the best-known mondegreens is from a Jimmy Hendrix song, "Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky" that was heard as,"Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy".
A couple of good ones happened at our local session as well. Someone asked us what tune we just played and we told him it was "Finbar Dwyer's". He came back the next week and asked us if we would play that tune "Thin Barbwire." Same thing happened when a bodhrán player asked us for the name of "The Ormand Sound". Next time he showed up he asked if we would play "The Armless Hand."
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by Phantom Button
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Thin Barbed-wire (correction)
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by Phantom Button
Re: My Son's a Prawn
She Begs For More.
---Michael B.
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by MichaelBolton
Re: My Son's a Prawn
We had a fella who used to play johnny kirkpatrick's Jump at the Sun, but with his south-eastern accent, it was mondegreened into Champ at the Sand.
Dave
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by showaddydadito
Re: My Son's a Prawn
no, it's the thursty widow, silly ...
In our dialect, dusty sounds a lot like 'dustig', which means 'thursty".
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by MM
Re: My Son's a Prawn
The Punch of Sniff
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by snorre
Re: My Son's a Prawn
There's a tune on a Johnny Doherty album called Easter Snows, which is an English mis-hearing of an Irish place name, as I recall. But it got transformed further into Esther's Nose, and Doherty even had a story about who Esther was.
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by GaryAMartin
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Jack, I've got the tune to that old Scottish song, it's only 12 bars in 3/4 so it's something that could be played around with for improvisation and extensions. I think I'll post it.
Trevor
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by Trevor Jennings
Re: My Son's a Prawn
By the way, the person killed along with Lady Mondegreen was one Thirla Murray:
Ye highlands and ye lawlands
Oh where hae ye been?
They hae slain Thirla Murray
An' Lady Mondegreen
Dave
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by showaddydadito
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Dave, I believe I've seen "Thirla Murray" in print as "The Earl of Murray", the person whom the Scottish song was about. Yet another superb mondegreen!
BTW, I've just submitted the tune of that Scottish song.
Trevor
# Posted on February 22nd 2004 by Trevor Jennings
Re: My Son's a Prawn
I've posted a set of words to "The Bonnie Earl of Murray" as a comment to the tune of the same name.
Trevor
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by Trevor Jennings
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Forty odd years ago, when my dad came back from a few months working in Australia, and I was only knee high to a grasshopper, he used to often be heard singing a song with chorus which demanded "What's in the Tilden?"
It was years later that I found out what was in the Tilden.
Dave
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by showaddydadito
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Jack, the great Jimi mondegreen is the namesake for www.kissthisguy.com. It's about pop music not trad, but hilarious. Mark
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by markwilson
Re: My Son's a Prawn
what was in the Tilden?
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by aye
Re: My Son's a Prawn
My tilda
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by Rudall the time
Re: My Son's a Prawn
we were doing this at the Seattle Irish Pipers Club tionol; "If you're drunk, is it sex that you want" for "if you're sick is it tea that you want". Must have been the beer. Had a great time in Seattle-hmmm, Piping in Seattle.
We could start a new thread- bent tune names
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by I_Fel
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Several years ago after Willie Week I was in a B&B in Ennis for a couple of days. There was a piper from Japan staying there as well, so we decided to play a few tunes together. He says to me "Do you know Crifzo Mohair?" I said, "No, I don't, but play a bit of it anyway." He launched into the tune and I said "Oh! Cliffs of Moher!"
Another one I've heard, although this may be apochryphal, is that there was some German guy who, when referring to Vincent Broderick's tune The Flagstone of Memories, instead called it Memories of Flagstones. (I've forgotten more flagstones than you'll ever know, buster!)
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by johnkerr
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Was that YOUR tilda Danny?
It's a very small one isn't it.
;o) Dave
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by showaddydadito
Re: My Son's a Prawn
A tangential mondegreen occurred at our sesh the other week. Rob had been clearing a loft and had found a french book of dots from about 25 years back. It has some pretty little tunes in. It is called the Massif Central tunebook. I suggested he should get a very large photocopy done, and place it in the middle of the room.
Then they passed me my coat.
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by showaddydadito
Re: My Son's a Prawn
it's not a tune but a type of tune.seamus begley said that in kerry they call hornpipes: condoms!!!
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by tonnta
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Speaking of Seamus Begley, that reminds me of how he introduced a set of tunes at a concert at the Feakle Festival last year. It was something like this: "Now this is a set of tunes we call Johnny O'Leary's. But actually, Johnny didn't call them that, he called them Julia Clifford's. But Julia Clifford, come to think of it, she called them Denis Murphy's. And Dennis Murphy, by God, he called them Padraig O'Keeffe's. And Padraig O'Keeffe, he called them...let me think now...Polkas. So there you are..."
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by johnkerr
Re: My Son's a Prawn
A slightly more tangential mondegreen is the story of the small boy who attended his grandfather's funeral. Back at the house the family were having the sandwiches and tea and someone spotted the little lad playing in the garden. He had dug a hole and was busy kicking his teddy bear into it, chanting "in the name of the father and of the son and in the 'ole 'e goes", as he was doing it.
Trevor
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by Trevor Jennings
Re: My Son's a Prawn
http://thesession.org/discussions/display.php/2447
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by Zina Lee
Re: My Son's a Prawn
earl the breakfast boiler
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by adae
Re: My Son's a Prawn
LOL @ these... this thread comes up often enough, the one I like that someone else posted was thinking that 'Ceol Rince na hÉireann' were laundry directions, Cool Rinse & Iron.
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by emily_bmore
Re: My Son's a Prawn
it's not a garbled tune name, but this seems to fit the thread:
in the very late 70s, i had an irish music program on a community radio station in california. i frequently got requests for to play stuff by the 'barfy band.'
sarah
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by sarahc
Re: My Son's a Prawn
I have had a session clown ask if I can play "the tune that goes up at the start".
# Posted on February 23rd 2004 by geoffwright
Re: My Son's a Prawn
I was playing a tune with a young lady the other night who innocently enquired if it was alright for her to go down while I stayed up. I really tried hard not to snigger...
# Posted on February 24th 2004 by Ottery
Re: My Son's a Prawn
There's the Old Hooker song they play before the rugby in Scotland "Awful hoor of Scotland".
Last St Patrick's Day, I was in Kazakhstan, and the Kazakh-Russian bar manager asked me if the Irish people in the bar would sing her favourite Irish song "Three Birds Fly". As in, "Where once we watched ..."
# Posted on February 24th 2004 by Bren
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Who'll come a-what's in ma tilda with me?
Anyway have we forgotten we had this kindov discussion before (why do I keep on saying that these days? - whenever I *do* come here) where we had:
The Kid on the Mountain Bike
Frigid of Knock
Banish My Foreskin
and there are more....
# Posted on February 24th 2004 by Rudall the time
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Yeah, do we have any more creative tune titles to add to our list of tunes to write just to go with the titles?
# Posted on February 24th 2004 by Zina Lee
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Surprise, surprise! I've been keeping a list over the past six months or so. Most are originals, but a bunch of them I've jotted down after seeing them here or hearing them from some musician or other. A few of them have actual tunes that go with them.
Commitment is Hell
Napoleon Crossing His Eyes
Napoleon Crossing His Fingers
Napoleon Crossing His T’s
Mug of Coors Light
Back She Comes
Toss the Cookies
Kitty’s Litter
Haste to Divorce Court
Hag With The Money, You Have Killed Me at the Churn
Humors of Secaucus
Smell of the Refinery
Maid in Taiwan
Pernod Before Dinner
Stack of What?
The Duke’s Loveseat
Colonel Mustard’s
Earl Catsup’s
The Maid Behind Bars
The Maid Behind the Bra
The Barmaid's Behind
Mickey Chewing the Fat
Mickey Chewing Tobacco
Mickey Eschewing Bubblegum
Ed Meese in the Bog
Swallow Ale Jig
Earn More of the Bucks
Planxty Joe Average
Santa’s Reel
Go Ask My Boss
The Humours of Seinfeld
The Barney Program
PC’s in Winter
Malls of Liz Carroll
A Kiss for a Date
Floss the Tethers
The Home Schooler
Old Hag, You Have Billed Me
The Great Waltz of China
The Balls of Liz Carroll
# Posted on February 24th 2004 by GaryAMartin
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Oh, I just thought of one more: Swallow Real Ale
# Posted on February 24th 2004 by GaryAMartin
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Mug of Coors Light -- now THERE's gotta be a terrible tune.
# Posted on February 24th 2004 by Zina Lee
Re: My Son's a Prawn
I was told of a tune learned at a French music festival called John Patterson - turned out to be Jump at the sun (try it with a french accent!)
# Posted on February 24th 2004 by lildogturpy
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Wasn't it Brad who gave us Waste in Bedding? Still laffing @ barfy band... LOL, sorry must be nurse humor day.....
# Posted on February 24th 2004 by emily_bmore
Re: My Son's a Prawn
Or a tune for the Internet age: maid@thespinningwheel.com.
# Posted on February 24th 2004 by johnkerr
Re: My Son's a Prawn
I don't get on this site often enough, so I'm late in the game with my answer...I first heard of mondegrens on an old album called Jean Ritchie and Oscar Brand live at ..? City Hall I think it was, and Oscar told the story. That must have been from the early 50's, the album was owned originally by my late in-laws, and my wife brought it over with her from New York 26 years ago.....so they are at least that old....
GP
# Posted on March 1st 2004 by Guernsey Pete
Re: My Son's a Prawn
So when did Jon Carrol call them mondegrens then......?
GP
# Posted on March 1st 2004 by Guernsey Pete
Re: My Son's a Prawn
I was close, but incorrect. Here's how the whole "mondegreen thing went down in John Carroll's own words:
As a child, the writer Sylvia Wright heard a plaintive Scottish ballad titled ``The Bonny Earl of Murray.'' One stanza, she believed, went like this:
Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands/ Oh Where hae you been?/ They hae slay the Earl of Murray/ And Lady Mondegreen.
How romantic, she thought, Lady Mondegreen perishing with her lord in the fierce, romantic wars of medieval Scotland. It was only much later that she realized that they had actually slain the Earl of Murray and ``laid him on the green.''
She began to collect similar mishearings of song lyrics, poems, patriotic utterances and the like, and in 1954 published a small article about them, coining the word ``mondegreen.'' Then she died and 30 years passed and, voila, a columnist in San Francisco discovered the term and founded a small cottage industry -- the collection and dissemination of mondegreens.
# Posted on March 1st 2004 by Phantom Button
Re: My Son's a Prawn
I also have a copy of Jean Ritchie and Oscar Brand at Town Hall in New York (so I am at least that old, too...)
I remember Oscar telling the Mondegren story as between-song 'patter'. Well, it bombed, apparently nobody in the concert audience 'got it', so the engineer spliced a few seconds of audience laughter in the final recording. Spliced - as in razor blade, this was the 1950s, no fades, just - silence then "Hahahah" then silence. I always remember that.
I could swear I was at a session once where someone asked if anyone knew a hornpipe called: The Rights of the Fairies. Add it to the list...
Bob
# Posted on March 8th 2004 by Laughtonb
Re: My Son's a Prawn
For those in the NYC area: The Canarsie Boys of Leather.
I apologize in advance.
Tim
# Posted on July 18th 2006 by tmcelrea