The name of the song is actually “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
Sting’s “We Work the Black Seam” contains the following line:
This is wrong on so many levels…
[ul]
[li]Carbon 14 is naturally-occurring, and hardly deadly.[/li]
[li]He seems to want to equate C-14 with nuclear power, confusing it with the C-14 that was produced by nuclear weapons tests in the mid-to-late 20th Century.[/li]
[li]He doesn’t seem to understand half-life, either. 12,000 years is (very roughly) double the half-life of C-14, but that doesn’t mean it’s **all **gone. It means 3/4 of it is gone. [/li]
[/ul]
I always think of winter starting in November or December. YMMV.
That one is generally understood to be an an ironic (or sarcastic, or whatever) song, and ol’ Merle smoked plenty of marijuana. He said it’s a good place to be “from.”
Yes, Young was wrong about the Aztec lifestyle, but Cortez was still a greedy, bloodthirsty bastard.
Rhyming forgotten with Johnny Rotten is not the only part that lets Neil off the hook. In a strange, vague song, he sings “the king is gone,” not dead, and he doesn’t quite say Rotten was the king. After the Sex Pistols, John[ny Rotten] Lydon didn’t do much to hit the headlines, unless you read Rolling Stone, so he’s pretty much gone, as I am.
Not an error per se , but more evidence of a shaky grasp of US geography - it’s always bugged me that the Kim Wilde song “Kids in America” goes
New York to East California
There’s a new wave coming I warn ya
East California? So this new wave travels all the way across the USA only to stop in what, Death Valley? Yosemite?
Kim was badly advised. She should have paid more attention to west coast markets.
“In the winter of '65, We were hungry, just barely alive.”
Au contraire. Joan Baez was not alive until 76 years later.
My sister and I were once in a store that had piped-in music, and this song was playing. When it came to the part about Captain Smith and Pocahontas whatever whatever, we both, independently of one another yet in perfect unison, went, “NO, THEY DIDN’T!” Sticklers for detail are we.
BTW, I really hate this song, and one of the reasons is the apparent lack of logic on the part of the narrator. Okay, so your two best examples of ‘fever’ being a time-honored tradition are Romeo & Juliet, and Capt. Smith & Pocahontas? The former two committed suicide at the age of 13, and the latter two not only didn’t end up together, but Pocahontas married another man and died of smallpox in her 20s. I’d say ‘fever’ is a bad thing.
Likewise, “Up On Cripple Creek”: “Straight down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico/to Lake Charles, Louisiana” - Lake Charles is on neither the Mississippi River nor the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s certainly nowhere near any place called Cripple Creek. That said, I’ll buy the explanation that the geography is purposely muddled for effect.
To all those discussing “Hey Hey, My My”: “The King is gone” refers to the death of Elvis.
Surely he’s singing about a ratio, or odds. 5:1 - which means you have a one-in-five chance of [whatever it is he’s on about - survival?].
Nope.
5-1 against something happening represents one chance in six that the event will come to pass.
Eva Peron did not sing-and-dance her way through Argentina.
Meat Loaf/For Cryin’ Out Loud
And I will receive somebody with open arms, open eyes,
Open up the sky and let the planet that I love shine through
If he’s referring to the sun, he means “star.”
Wait a minute. Joannie sings a song with the lyric “Back with my wife in Tennesee,” and you’re have a problem about her age?
The concept of gay marriage had not been invented then. Indeed, a woman and her wife would both have been stoned or hanged or burned.
This is a love song, right? Perhaps he’s referring to “Venus”.
I think that was the point. His death, and the subsequent memorializing, was in the news in the winter of 1963–64. Even in northern English towns.
The King is gone, my butt is itchy
This is the tale of John Simon Ritchie*
*(i.e., Sid Vicious’ real name)
Let me guess: you also have problems with Jimi Hendrix’s If 6 Was 9 (on both grammatical and mathematical bases).
Because then it makes no sense… If the song isn’t from an American perspective why reference JFK? Don’t tell me the whole generational “I remember where I was when I heard JFK was shot” thing is a phenomenon in Britain as well!
…And whaddyaknow, Wikipedia has an entry about this very song, and dammit, it is about a town in England and not the US. Yet another cherished illusion shattered by the Dope! Will you animals leave me with nothing?!
“Emily” by Joanna Newsom, about her astrophysicist sister. It’s a great song but includes a few variations on this:
She got meteorite and meteroid backward…
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is a surprisingly accurate song. Gordon Lightfoot was inspired to write the song by a Newsweek article and got most of the facts correct.