This is about a year overdue, because it was over a year ago that I learned the lovely Moody-Bluesish song that I’ve heard off and on for thirty years, Forever Autumn, was from Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds album. Which I remember picking up in a store about 30 years ago, thinking “That looks interesting” and putting it back down, never to consider it again… until I saw that it was being revived in a massive orchestral stage production with clips on Youtube… and saw that ‘Forever Autumn’ was part of it! Shocker!
So what song or line or whatever have you known for years & was amazed to find where it originated from?
I always thought that Jethro Tull’s 1970 song “For Michael Collins, Jeffery, and Me” was pleasant enough, but the words made little sense until I realized it referred to the Apollo 11 astronaut who circled the moon alone while his two buddies went down to the lunar surface and back. One of the lines is “I’m with you LEM…though it’s a shame that it had to be you…” “LEM” was the original shorthand name for the lunar module.
This is kind of weird, but I think it applies. I recently read “The Lost Horizon” and it made reference to Shangri-La in such a way that I got the impression the characters in the story had never heard the term before. So I looked it up, and sure enough, this was the book that introduced that phrase. That was kind of a weird realization.
I did know this, but just in case anyone still doesn’t…
Mah Nà Mah Nà (or ‘Mahna, Mahna’), which most people know from The Muppet Show, made its debut in an Italian quasi-porn pseudo-documentary called Sweden: Heaven And Hell.