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Author: Jake Was Here

Jul 1st 2009 at 2:43:26 PM

"Often the reason we don't know what the singer is singing is that the singer does not enunciate clearly. Elton John, for example, often sounds as though he's singing in a foreign language, possibly Welsh. James Brown routinely sings entire songs without making a single intelligible statement other than 'Hey!'

"Sometimes the problem is that the singer himself doesn't know what he's singing. As I mentioned elsewhere in this book, I sometimes play in a literary rock band, the Rock Bottom Remainders. As I also mentioned elsewhere in this book, we suck, but our musical director is an actual talented legend, Al Kooper (. . .) Al did one solo number -- a long, slow, powerful blues song called 'Caress Me Baby' -- and although I understood all the other lyrics he sang, there was one line I could never get. Al sang it with tremendous passion, and it sounded like he was singing, 'Goan rare-ro hah-dee-nah' (. . .) It turned out that Al didn't know what the real lyrics were, either. He had listened repeatedly to the original recording of 'Caress Me Baby', and the closest thing he could come up with was 'Gonna railroad high tonight', and so when he sang the song he just slurred that part."

-- ''DaveBarry's Book Of Bad Songs''