In a song with a gender reference such as He’s So Fine or Lets Hear It for the Boy, do you switch the gender nouns and pronouns?
Me. If I’m singing along with the radio, I don’t. But I sometimes do it solo.
Nope. And it’s never really occurred to me to do so. Similarly, I wouldn’t switch the gender references if I were reading poetry, a novel excerpt, etc.
And just in case someone comes into this thread saying that they would feel gay singing “Let’s Hear it for the Boy” without changing the gender, I will assert that singing “Let’s Hear it for the Boy” is gay in and of itself. 
Flipping genders in Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” probably makes it more embarrassing to be caught singing it.
I’ve been a bad, bad boy
I’ve been careless with a delicate woman…? Nah.
I have, but only if the song has special meaning for me. Plus I only sing them to myself. I wouldn’t flip genders for, say, a Karaoke performance.
It’s been done professionally too. I’ve heard Me and Bobby McGee sung both ways.
No, but occasionally, when singing at bardic circles around a campfire, I have been known to present a disclaimer before singing a gender-specific song.
Some songs have been gender-flipped by enough singers that I’m not even sure which is the original. In such cases, it only makes sense to use the version appropriate to my own gender and orientation.
I’ve only ever done it while singing The Offspring’s “Self-Esteem” in the car by myself. And that’s only because it ends up feeling entirely different when sung from the perspective of a woman. Irrational cultural disconnects are interesting.
No. Keeping the lyrics as is makes for some entertaining karaoke moments, like when I did Kesha’s “Blah Blah Blah” with the line “don’t be a little bitch with your chitchat, just show me where your dick’s at.”
When singing historical ballads, I don’t. Most of us tend to keep the historical integrity on those. However, anything else that I sing in public will have the gender switched when appropriate. If there’s no good way to do that, I either sing back-up with a guy or don’t sing the song at all.
Yeah, this is a significant point. In particular, for any songs from the “Great American Songbook” songwriters of the Tin Pan Alley era it was pretty much expected that the gender indicators would be changed.
Sometimes, though, a singer comes to the conclusion that there should be more changed than a simple he/she flip. Ultimately they end up rewriting a lyric that negatively impacts the integrity of the song.
From Cole Porter’s “Looking at You”:
Looking at you
I’m filled with the essence of
The quintessence of joy
Looking at you
I hear poets tellin’ of
Lovely Helen of Troy
That’s a great lyric. Unfortunately, I have heard some female vocalists change it to:
Looking at you
I’m filled with the essence of
The quintessence of joy
Looking at you
I can’t help but tellin’ of
Who’s my favorite boy!
HORRIBLE LYRIC!!!
Here’s a special case. Originally written by a man, first released version by a man- and a respectably sized hit- but the most famous version is by a woman.
I think most people who cover the song think of themselves as covering a Janis Joplin song, but anyone who want to sing of a female Bobby actually has the justification that that’s how the song was originally written.
I think generally women are more comfortable than men are with not changing the lyrics.
I like not changing the lyrics, but sometimes I do when I think changing the lyrics has a specific impact/significance.
Example#1:
The Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry penned song “Then He Kissed Me”, originally performed by The Crystals.
When The Beach Boys covered it, they kept the boy part and the girl part the same in the narrative of the song but they flipped the perspective. They sang from the boy’s perspective, the result being:
“Then I Kissed Her”
So, The Beach Boys keep the boy as the active character and the girl as the passive character- which was in keeping with traditional gender roles.
“He walked up to me and asked me if I wanted to dance”
becomes
“I walked up to her and I asked her if she wanted to dance”
This always bugged me- why does the song have to be so rewritten to make sure the girl is kept in the passive role? Why is that aspect so important? So when I perform the song I only change the gender indicators. The girl is the active character: “She walked up to me and asked me if I wanted to dance” Thus, the traditional gender roles get challenged.
Disclaimer that I did change one lyric other than gender indicators:
“When he asked me to be his bride”
I change to:
“When she agreed that she’d be my bride”
Yeah, that does imply that the boy was the active one when it came time to propose- but the girl is the active character throughout the rest of the song so it evens out.
Example #2:
Kirsty MacColl’s song “Terry”
This is a fun song that plays with the earlier girl group convention of my-guy-is-so-tough" from songs like “Leader of the Pack”, “He’s a Rebel”, and the most appropriately analogous “My Boyfriend’s Back”.
In MacColl’s playful song, she addresses and ex-boyfriend who’s bothering her warning that she’s got a new boyfriend “Terry” and Terry is going to kick the ex-boyfriend’s ass.
Since Terry can either be a boy’s name or a girl’s name, I thought it would be cool to only change the gender indicators so that now it becomes a story that my new girlfriend is so badass and tough and she’ll beat you up if you don’t stop bothering me.
Disclaimer that I did change one lyric other than gender indicators:
“Terry is as tough as Marlon Brando”
I change to:
“Terry is as tough as Suzi Quatro”
I’m a member of our local Gay Men’s Chorus, and this issue comes up from time to time. Some choruses go out of their way to change every “she” to a “he,” and although this seems appropriate for a duet, sometimes it gets to be too much. But our thinking is that if we’re doing an old song that has become a “classic,” like something from the Great American Songbook, we respect the song by not tampering with it. Like if we were doing “Maria” from West Side Story, it would be repulsive to change anything. On the other hand, we’ve done “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” as a MM duet, and it was wonderful. But we did “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” as a super-energetic dance number . . . without changing anything. It was perfect.
The judge said, “Hon, what is your alibi?”
(Alteration of “Long Black Veil” by Marijohn Wilkins/Lefty Frizzell—originally “‘Son, what is your alibi?’”)
I’d love to hear The Killers’ “Somebody Told Me” performed by a woman without any gender-flipping.
A (straight, American) female friend of mine sang Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” at a karaoke box in Japan, and my Japanese friend who’d never heard it before asked if it was meant to be a lesbian song. Aside from the fact that she’d just heard a woman sing it and the name “Jessie” is ambiguous, she pointed out that the lyrics were showing up on the karaoke machine in red instead of white which usually meant that it was a song meant for a woman to sing.
Since “Jessie” can be a woman’s name one could attempt a heterosexual woman’s version – “Jessie’s Guy” or “Jessie’s Boy” – and flip the he’s and she’s around but “Where can I find a man like that?” doesn’t fit the meter. I suppose “fella” would be the best substitution, but that seems corny.
Yes, every few minutes even when I am not singing. But that is my problem.
There is also the fact that Bobby is much more a stereotypically male than female name, to the extent that the original Kris Kristofferson version always seems a little off kilter to me. There is a slight double-take as I remind myself that there are occasional Robertas who go by Bobbie. (I also like how, in Janis’ version, it is the guy who wants to settle down and make a home: a very mild subversion of stereotype, but just enough to add a faint frisson.)
That may work today, but it would have been jarringly unrealistic in the 1960s.
I think the Beach Boys’ version works very well. It is natural for a protagonist to see himself (or herself, come to that) as taking an active role, and in the Beach Boys’ version this is reflected in the flipped lyrics, while at the same time it remains realistic in terms of how actual gender relations worked at the time. Indeed, it presents something like an exemplar or ideal model of how things were meant to work.
The Crystals’ version really does suffer from the protagonist being too passive, however. Girls did not really walk up to boys and ask them to dance in the 1960s (well, not normally, and certainly not nice girls, and this is certainly a song about a nice, very conventional girl), but they could and did take some sort of active role (and, probably even more, imagined themselves to be taking an active role) in getting a boy to ask them to dance – by smiling at him, batting their eyelids, or whatever. In The Crystals’ version of this song though, the girl seems to see herself as totally passive, to a degree that is almost a little creepy.
In this case The Beach Boys took a relatively crappy song (lyrically anyway) and by flipping genders turned it into a minor masterpiece. Actually, I think Janis Joplin did much the same with “Me and Bobby McGee”. (Well, in that case it was a fairly good song the original way; but she made it much better.)
On thinking about it some more, I think I’m OK with flipping the genders if it’s just a matter of a few pronouns, or maybe one “guy”/“girl” swap or the like, but a lot of these examples people are coming up with are just too much to cleanly change.
I actually don’t. If it makes me seem like I have a different sexual orientation, so be it.