That’s funny. Never noticed the CA NV thing and did that song a lot.
We used to play Merle Haggard’s “Daddy Frank” fairly often. One night I wondered aloud about a lyric
“Momma couldn’t hear our pretty music, but she read our lips and help the family sing”
Really? Momma was deaf and helped you sing. I wonder what that sounded like?
My take on the song quoted in the OP was that the singer first traveled coast to coast (East Coast to West Coast) and then from Los Angeles to Chicago. Since I don’t know the song I don’t know if this makes any sense in context, but I was imagining a song about a singer who has to travel around a lot to do concerts and events and might have to hop from one big city to another.
The song doesn’t actually say he’s at Folsom for the crime of shooting the man in Reno, does it? If not, it’s possible that he wasn’t apprehended for the murder in Reno but was arrested in California on unrelated charges.
If we’re talking about songs that are factually wrong, can I propose a Lifetime Achievement Award for Johnny Horton?
Because so many of his songs are just filled with factual errors.
Comanche, the Brave Horse: “one lone survivor…” seems to me that a lot of the Indians survived this battle.
North to Alaska: “Big Sam left Seattle in the year of ninety-two”.
– The Alaska Gold Rush was started by the strikes at Circle City in 1893, and the main one, Rabbit Creek in 1896. This song says “the rush is on”, but it appears that Big Sam started rushin’ a few years early!
The Battle of New Orleans: “In 1814 we took a little trip…”
– But the Battle of New Orleans (the climactic battle) was in 1815.
“Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip”
– the battleground was up river from New Orleans.
“And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans”
– no, they caught them outside New Orleans – preventing the British from taking the town was the point of the battle.
“We looked down the river and we see’d the British come”
– the British came by land, marching across from Lake Borgne.
“they began to runnin’, On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico”
– the British retreat was also by land, back across to Lake Borgne and into the Gulf.
Preventing them from going down the Mississippi, into New Orleans, was what the Americans were fighting for.
Perhaps the highlight is his song Sink the Bismarck, which has factual errors in nearly every line:
In May of nineteen forty-one the war had just begun
– the war began in 1939, 3 years earlier; hardly “just begun”.
The Germans had the biggest ship that had the biggest guns
– the biggest warships were the Japanese battleships Yamato & Musashi, bigger than the Bismarck, and with much bigger (18.1" vs. 15") guns. If you discount them because they weren’t actually at sea until after the Bismarck was sunk, then the German sister ship Tirpitz was larger than the Bismarck.
The Bismarck was the fastest ship that ever sailed the sea
– There were at least 4 faster battleships at the time, German Scharnhorst, French Richelieu, Italian Vittorio Veneto, and even the antiquated British Hood, which Bismarck sunk. And many passenger liners were even faster: the Queen Mary (30.9 knots to the Bismarcks 30.1) or the Normandie. And those were documented speed records, while the Bismarck’s speed wasn’t.
On her decks were guns as big as steers and shells as big as trees
– her largest guns (on the turrets, not on her decks) were 15"; most steers are quite a bit bigger than that. And many trees are much bigger. Probably reversed here to make the rhyme work.
Out of the cold and foggy night came the British ship The Hood
– May is Springtime in the north Atlantic, not the coldest time of the year (though still pretty cold). But there isn’t much fog at those temperatures. Also the battle with the Hood didn’t take place at night, but at 6 in the morning. And it was the ship Prince of Wales that came out first, the Hood followed behind.
The Bismarck started firing fifteen miles away
– It was the Hood that started firing first, when they were about 12.5 miles apart. Bismarck didn’t fire until 2 minutes later, when they were only 11 miles apart.
We gotta sink the Bismarck was the battle sound
But when the smoke had cleared away the mighty Hood went down
– The Hood was hit, exploded, and sank all within 3 minutes – hardly time for the smoke to have cleared. In fact, it was the smoke that enabled Prince of Wales to escape from the battle.
For six long days and weary nights they tried to find her trail
– HMS Suffolk was fitted with the new radar, so was able to continue shadowing Bismarck most of this time. It was only the last couple of days when Bismarck managed to get away. Even then, radio monitoring gave the British a fair idea of where Bismarck was.
Churchill told the people put every ship asail
– Why he told the people instead of the Navy is curious. And would you really send sailboats and yachts into the North Atlantic? But in fact, only a limited number of British ships were sent after the Bismarck – most were busy and could not be spared. Many of the ones sent were old, obsolete ships, like the carrier Ark Royal that was sent from the Mediterranean.
Cause somewhere on that ocean I know she’s gotta be
– Well, at least this line has no factual errors (but not much info, either).
The fog was gone the seventh day and they saw the morning sun
Ten hours away from homeland the Bismarck made its run
– Bismarck was going toward the coast of France, hardly her homeland. And it wasn’t much of a run, since an airplane bomb the evening before had jammed her steering, so she was only able to cruise in a circle.
The British guns were aimed and the shells were coming fast
The first shell hit the Bismarck they knew she couldn’t last
– Not aimed very well – only about 1 in 7 of the shells fired hit the Bismarck, and most of them just bounced off her armor. And she wasn’t sunk by gunfire, nobody claims that. The British battleships were nearly out of shells and had been sent home before the Bismarck sank. She was hit by torpedoes just before sinking, but at the same time survivors have said they were ordered to open valves and scuttle the ship, to prevent her capture. Recent examination of the underwater wreckage seems to confirm the scuttling theory – none of the shell hits below the waterline actually penetrated the Bismarck’s armor.
Despite all the factual errors, I still love his songs.
Music doesn’t depend on facts!
I detect a factual error in this factual error.
Bargain (Who) “In life one and one don’t make two, one and one make one.”
Ah, yes, I am sure that must have been what she was thinking. :rolleyes:
It’s called a metaphor, dear. Songwriters use them a lot.
Moxy Fruvous manages to place Mt. Washington in Maine, and mis-identifies the lowest highest elevation in the US, both in the same song.
NM
Lou Reed-Sick of You
They arrested the Mayor for an illegal favor
sold the Empire State to Japan
And Oliver North married William Secord
and gave birth to a little Tehran
It’s actually Richard Secord.
To be really ironic he drives instead and ends up in a four-car highway pileup
It’s minor, but it’s annoying: Slade’s “Far Far Away” includes the line:
Not without pharmaceuticals, you haven’t (at least on Earth). The sun will always appear to rise in the eastern half of the sky, and appear to set in the western half. It cannot set in the east.
Madonna:
Quicker than a ray of light
Quicker than a ray of light
Quicker than a ray of light
Nonsense!!!
…Unless she’s talking about Cherenkov Radiation or something 
I’ll give my usual one in such threads: “Cotton Fields,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. The lyrics say the fields are “down in Louisiana, just about a mile from Texarkana.” But the Louisiana state line is a good 30 miles from Texarkana.
The Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek” places the titular locale on Lake Charles, Louisiana. There’s a Cripple Creek in Colorado, and one in Virginia, but there’s not one in Louisiana.
Boney M’s “Rasputin” describes Rasputin as “lover of the Russian queen” - Rasputin was many things to the czar’s family, but the queen’s lover he was not. Whether he was, in fact, “Russia’s greatest love machine”, of course, is a matter of opinion.
Korpiklaani’s “Vodka” contains a line wherein the singer is “promising that the vodka we serve is as pure as it was thousands of years ago”. Vodka was first distilled in the 8th century, which is hardly “thousands” of years ago; and early vodka was considerably less pure than it is today, owing to primitive methods of distillation and the use of potatoes rather than grain spirit. Gin, in fact, was originally invented in order to salvage the unusably bitter vodka of the Middle Ages by covering the unpalatable aftertaste with herbal notes.
To touch on the errors in The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald;
[QUOTE=Gordon Lightfoot]
concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
when they left fully loaded for Cleveland
[/QUOTE]
The Edmund Fitzgerald was bound for Detroit, not Cleveland, on its final voyage.
The cook on the final voyage was a replacement crewman because the regular cook was sick, had never sailed on the ship before, and was a younger man.
The theory that the Edmund Fitzgerald sank because the hatches were improperly secured has been discounted. Wikipedia notes that Lightfoot now sings this line differently in concert.
In the last radio transmission from the ship, some ten minutes or so prior to the sinking, the captain stated that they were “holding our own”. It’s likely that the ship sank suddenly and that the captain did not see it coming.
Obligatory clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1TVSTkAXg
Let’s say you were vacationing in Beijing could you say, “I’ve seen the sun set in China”?
Or if you wanted to be less specific, “I’ve seen the sun set in the far east”?
Or to be even less specific, “I’ve seen the sun set in the east”?
Similarly if you were in Manitoba, could you say “I’ve seen the sun set in the north”?
Or if you were in Cape Town, could you say “I’ve seen the sun set in the south”?
I always took that song to mean she was intending to head to America to make her fortune and was informing said kids of same.
In Cortez the Killer, Neil Young describes the Aztecs as “never having known war,” or something to that effect. Actually, they had spent much of the 1400s conquering various peoples (Zapotecs, Otomis, etc.) and incorporating them into their tribute structure…that’s why you see towns with Nahuatl names in places like the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca state (where people speak Zapotec, Chinantec, etc.), and forms of Nahuatl spoken even as far as coastal El Salvador.
(But Neil’s larger point about Spanish brutality and destruction of native culture is still valid, of course.)
Yeah, but by sending them into the Mojave Desert or the Sierra Nevada? I guess they could make a few bucks working the ski lifts around Lake Tahoe… 
That would be rather impressive, since potatoes originated in the Americas and weren’t known to the rest of Europe until the 17th century. And it’s certainly possible to make vodka that is as pure as the original, it just wouldn’t be very good by current standards.