[FrankHudson]

In my core I guess I'm a folk musician. That means an approach that there is no "official" version of a song, that if you're playing for an audience you might fit the song to the audience, that authorship belongs somewhat to the singer, and that you can freely move between the antique charm of a very old song to the immediacy of making it sound like it happened last night.

I revere wordsmiths and songwriters, and I even take a persnickety exception to those that assume more famous musicians must have written the lyrics to their songs. But then I revere John Coltrane too and I don't play My Favorite Things note for note (not that I could!) and it's unlikely he felt he had to follow Julie Andrews' phrasing exactly either.

Others feel differently, and produce fine performances too.


The folk process, where stuff gets modified by performers produces plenty of failed attempts to improve things, which isn't a definitive argument against it because it can also keep things alive.

As to mistakes and mondegreens: there's a line in one of my favorite Dylan lesser-known songs Please Crawl Out Your Window which is usually written down as "their religion of little ten women" which is a bad enough line that "Dewey Cox" could have written it. Dylan never got a take he liked, and there several bootleg/out-take versions where he sings slightly different lyrics, but in one I heard him sing what sounded like "his religion of polluted women." I've loved that misheard line so much that I always use my mondegreen when I sing it. I just think it's a great line and adds to the song's impact.

In a version of Robert Johnson's Hellhound on My Trail, Peter Green reversed the blues stanza Johnson sang and instead sung "If today was Christmas Day/If today was Christmas Day/and tomorrow was Christmas Eve." Mistake or intended? I don't know, but it's a genius line isn't it. There are whole songs wringing out that metaphor: If I Could Turn back the Hands of Time, Yesterday, and so on. But in the middle of that dark song with wind sounding leaves in December trees, it sure works.