I can’t think of any specific Christmas carols that have be altered ('tho I’m sure there are) but the majority of traditional carols have dissappeared, since they’re almost all about getting drunk, and include veiled threats of violence by the carolers to their hosts if they don’t make with the wassail (rum or beer punch) and be quick about it.
(there’s a faint echo left in “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”:
"…so bring us some figgy pudding
and bring it right here.
We won’t go until we get some
we won’t go until we get some
we won’t go until we get some
So bring it right here. ")
“Yankee Doodle” apparently has hundreds of verses, and only a very few are going to pass muster with a kindergarten teacher. Here are a couple (you know the tune):
Two and two may go to bed
Two and two together
And if there is not room enough
Lie one a top o’other.
Heigh ho for our Cape Cod
Heigh Ho Nantasket
Do not let the Boston wags
Feel your Oyster basket.
Keep it up, indeed.
There were problems with The Kinks’ follow-up single to “Lola” as well.
In the original version of “Apeman,” Ray Davies sang what sounded for all the world to be…
“‘cause the air pollution is a-fuckin’ up my eyes”
Kinks scholars are still debating whether Ray actually sang this, or whether it was just a quirky British accent thing and what he really sang was…
“‘cause the air pollution is a-foggin’ up my eyes”
In any case, just as with “Lola,” Ray had to return to the studio to basically re-sing one word. So on the single version of “Apeman,” he enunciates “foggin’” quite clearly.
Given its ubiquitousness as THE world peace and understanding song of the last half of the 20th Century, John Lennon’s “Imagine” would seem a natural for use by church youth groups, choirs or similar such outfits.
Has anyone ever seen a performance of this song by such a group? I’ve always wondered what they do with the lines “and no religion too” and “no hell below us, above us only sky”!
When I was in college, I played in the brass band. Every year, our band would get together with a couple of other brass bands (one of which was the local Salvation Army band) for a massed brass band concert.
We traded around music between the bands. When we were rehearsing before one of the concerts, a lot of us thought it was really funny that one of the Salvation Army hymns we were playing sounded exactly like “How Dry I Am.” When we finally got together to rehearse on the concert day, we found out that it was supposed to sound like it. The Salvation Army regularly mined drinking songs for the tunes for hymns so that the people they picked up off the street would be able to sing along.
Speaking of Christmas music being censored, there are a couple of religious carols even that sometimes have verses left out when recorded for music collections, presumably because the music companies want all “up” tunes.
For example, in “What Child is This?” the second half of the second verse, when refering to the child in his mother’s lap, goes “nail, spear shall pierce him through, the cross be born for me and you” I guess that sounds grim. Too bad it’s true.
And in “We Three King of Orient Are” the gift of myrhh is told as “Myrhh have I, it’s bitter perfume/Breathes an air of gathering gloom, Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in the stone cold tomb.”