The prime (or first, or principal) meridian of the Dominion Land Survey:
Sink the Bismark by Johnny Horton
“The Bismark was the fastest ship that ever sailed the seas
On her deck were guns as big as steers and shells as big as trees”
Ah, I think you got that backwards Johnny.
Well, then … I hope you can report that you were at your cousin’s party! 
Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer”: the Aztecs were not a bunch of nature-worshipping peace-loving hippies who joyously built pyramids when they weren’t grooving about: they were a savage bunch of bloodthirsty death-obsessed warmongering bastards, and good riddance to the lot of them.
…
“Born and raised in South Detroit” usually gets a chuckle out of people from Detroit, doesn’t it? It’s pretty much a lake, or Windsor.
Here’s mathematician and physicist Simon Singh taking issue with Katie Melua’s bad science: Comment in the Guardian.
The argument was over the lyrics to Melua’s 2005 single “Nine Million Bicycles”:
Singh understandably felt he had to speak up: “When Katie sings ‘We are 12 billion light-years from the edge’, she is suggesting that this is the distance to the edge of the observable universe, which in turn implies that the universe is only 12 billion years old. (…) As soon as the idea of the Big Bang was proposed in the 1920s, astronomers set about trying to work out when the bang happened. Initial estimates were, not surprisingly, wildly inaccurate, but by the 1980s it was known that the universe was 15 billion years old, give or take 5 billion years. Today, the very latest data implies that the age of the universe is precisely 13.7 billion years. This is an astonishing result, because astronomers are giving the first decimal place in their estimate of the age of the universe, implying a hitherto unheard-of level of confidence in their measurements. (…) In short, Katie Melua has no right to call the age of the universe ‘a guess’ or quote it as 12 billion years when we now know it to be 13.7 billion years old.”
Singh suggested the following revised lyrics:
As the Wiki article about the incident points out, however, the lyrics are still incorrect. While the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, the distance to the edge of the observable universe is greater than 13.7 billion light years, due to the expansion of the universe.
Now, now. This was widely debated in Chicago when the song came out, and although it’s less well known than the North, South, or West Sides, there is in fact an East Side of Chicago, hard against the Indiana border. In the Chicago phone book, there’s a whole column of businesses and community organizations with “East Side” in their name.
Most geographers restrict the Great Plains to the higher-altitude, short-grass steppe found farther west than Manitoba. Notice how the wiki map superimposes the 100th meridian on the Great Plains. In the United States, at least, the 100th meridian is often used as a metaphorical eastern border for the plains, or for the West in general, even though it isn’t geographically exact.
From Life in a Northern Town, by one-hit wonder The Dream Academy:
In winter 1963
It felt like the world would freeze
With John F. Kennedy
And the Beatles
By winter of 1963, John F. Kennedy was dead.
Of course they might have been talking about the winter of 1962-63, or speaking from the viewpoint of someone in the Southern Hemisphere. If you want to get all technical about it.
Krakatoa is not east of Java. Though not originated by the B-52s, this notion was perpetuated by them.
I know this is a well know gaffe, but I don’t get it- wouldn’t the land to the left of the lake be the east side? Maybe its not called that by anyone, but technically the area opposite the west side is the east side?
I’m told by some that Ramblin’ Man contains an error as the bayou and the delta are supposedly different areas, but the song implies they are the same.
Lyrics by Don Black & Chris Hampton. Black also had a woman in NYC sing “He’s doing some deal up in Baltimore now” and later while in Hollywood, “Every man and beast came from out east.”
Lady has no sense of direction
That would make sense, since Dream Academy was English. In England the Beatles were well known in winter 1962-63, while Kennedy was alive.
In America the only nexus was after Kennedy’s death. Beatlemania is sometimes attributed to public hunger for a pop-culture distraction after the assassination. (As if we needed an excuse for a distraction!) But that took place in the winter of 1963-64.
I can’t believe I’m defending the lyrics to inane songs.
Neighborhood names aren’t entirely rational. The areas alongside the lake are called the Lake Front, or the Loop, or the Gold Coast, or Hyde Park, but absolutely never the East Side. As I say above, there is an East Side of Chicago, but it’s alongside the Indiana border, not Lake Michigan.
Anyway, the factual hilarity in “The Night Chicago Died” isn’t the geography, it’s the idea of Capone shooting in out with the Chicago Police.
Why would he damage his own property? 
I’ve always heard that as “the isles of Greece”, which makes sense, since there are many Greek islands, even if most of Greece is a pair of peninsulas (separated by the Corinth Canal, which I think technically makes the Peloponessos the largest Greek island, and no longer a peninsula).
Merle Haggard, in “Okie from Muskogee,” sings “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee.” Well, I been there, and Merle’s mighty wrong about that.
Well, Zager and Evans got most of it right, but they were waaaaaay of on 7510.
and Kinky Friedman’s “Asshole from El Paso” doesn’t even mention Hal Briston
We keep our women virgins till they’re married.
So hosing sheep is good enough for us.
Well, I at least can believe I’m defending this song as I do it, since I did like it a lot when it was a hit (I even bought it on a 45 RPM record) and still do.
JFK died on November 22, 1963. So these lyrics refer to the winter following his assassination as a period of bleak despair for the denizens of a small town in the American North, into which came The Beatles. Spot on factually, really.
In a “northern town” as sung about (i.e., somewhere in Wisconsin or Vermont), especially back in 1963, there would almost certainly have been freezing temperatures and snowfall by November 22nd, and possibly snow remaining on the ground all day long. This is winter by anyone’s everyday definition, with only eggheads waiting for the winter solstice. “Beatlemania” in the US began very shortly afterwards, in December 1963 and January 1964 (and building up quickly enough that their arrival in Feb 1964 was to delirious crowds).