Getting back to creative works, has anyone here watched the TV show Travellers? The main characters are time travelers from the future where Earth is failing, and food is scarce, and awful.
There’s a running joke about characters eating what we consider to be cheap or bad food, and being amazed at how great it is! One guy talks about his breakfast. "It’s three different kinds of food, all served on a muffin from England!
There’s other characters gushing about hospital food and the school cafeteria.
Heh, I just watched a YouTube featuring a defector from the North Korean army trying American MREs for the first time. His comment: “they’d wish for war every day just to eat this”.
The first time I tried MREs in 1987 on a Marine field training exercise with my NROTC unit, I thought they were manna from heaven—which they were, when compared to the decade-old C-rations we were given before that.
I’ve listened to “Soul Man” (the Sam & Dave original) many times. But I was listening to it today and I belatedly thought “This song was released in 1967. How was there a reference in it to the Woodstock festival which didn’t occur until 1969?”
So I looked it up. It wasn’t a reference to the music festival. It’s a reference to Woodstock High School, which had been a segregated school in Tennessee. (Which makes more sense considering the singer was educated there.)
Re-reading my post, I realize I may have created some confusion.
I made a reference to the singer being educated there. That was a reference to the line in the song:
I was brought up on a side street, listen now
I learned how to love before I could eat
I was educated at Woodstock
When I start lovin’, oh, I can’t stop
Woodstock High School was a real school in Millington, Tennessee. (It’s now an elementary school.) But neither of the Soul Man’s singers, Sam Moore and Dave Prater, or writers, Isaac Hayes and Dave Porter, attended that school. I assume that Hayes and Porter, who grew up in the Memphis area, had heard the name of the school and thought it fit in the lyrics.
I can’t believe I went my whole life, up until a few days ago, having the lyrics for Wish You Were Here wrong in my head, until my 20 year old daughter corrected me.
The real lyrics for the part in question are
How I wish, how I wish you were here
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year
Running over the same old ground, what have we found?
The same old fears, wish you were here
That last line “The same old fears…” I’ve always heard as “The same old fish”.
I went through the same thought process, decades ago, and translated it as “I was educated by good stock.” Like, his family instilled the best values in him.
Fun fact: Sam Moore (in the original Sam & Dave version) and John Belushi (in the Blues Brothers live cover) both called out “Play it, Steve!” to the same Steve. Legendary session guitarist Steve “the Colonel” Cropper played on both.
I often felt like Dan Aykroyd and Jon Belushi were reviving an old forgotten genre with the Blues Brothers. But in reality, their performance of “Soul Man” on SNL was only eleven years after the original Sam & Dave version. And their recording of the song was a year later.
The Soul Man lyrics are “I was educated and good stock.” Nothing about Woodstock. Can’t prove it, but it sounds that way on headphones, makes a helluva lot more sense, and some lyrics sites have it that way.
The original Sam & Dave version is clearly “I was educated at Woodstock.”
Dave Porter himself has confirmed that the line refers to Woodstock High School, a segregated black school in Tennessee.
The Blues Brothers changed the line to “I was educated from good stock.” There seems to be no documentation as to exactly why. My theory is that Belushi realized it would be a bad look for a white guy to sing about going to an all-black school in the ‘60s. Another possibility is that they wanted to avoid confusion with the subsequent Woodstock festival. Either way, it’s unlikely that Belushi simply got it wrong.
