Like many of us here, I enjoy the railroad songs of Hank Snow. But I wonder if I can get some help on the meaning of a lyric from his song “I’m movin’ in.” Please note, this isn’t his much more famous song “I’m movin’ on.” I’ll include the link here:
At about 1:21 the lyric seems to be, “…so you’d better get loose, from your other caboose, and meet this old SP (?)”… or, what? So: Is this the right lyric? And what the heck does he mean by this?
By the way, this is a fine song in its own right and must be a follow-up of sorts to “I’m movin on.”
It is “…this old S.P.” I have no idea, unless the reference is to the Southern Pacific standard caboose design, which was a very good one. Lionel made plenty of O gauge versions!
I’m sure the singer is referring to himself as a sort of non-1st class train (“this old SP”); it couldn’t be the Sunset Limited. Must be some sort of milk train local, no?
But you two nailed it. Thanks for the help.
Remember the Beach Boys “Help me Rhonda”? One guy wrote he used to think the first line was, “Well, since she put me down there’ve been owls puking in my bed…”
Look at the illuminated sign on the rear, I may be misreading it, but I know that the rear car on the Sunset was made so you almost had to stand to see where you had been. .
Misunderstood lyrics can be fun all right! How about the classic from Creedence Clearwater?
“There’s a bathroom on the right!” instead of “There’s a bad moon on the rise!”
Everytime I hear “Bad Moon Rising” and they come to that line I get a mental image of young women at a rock concert getting up en masse and moving to the right of the stage!
I’m not sure how you’d class this one: “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” Legend has it that the actual name of the song is “In The Garden of Eden,” but the band was supposedly so trashed that they couldn’t pronounce it properly…
Remember the line in Hotel California? “Warm smell of police cars, rising up through the air.”
I’ve heard that this kind of thing is called a “mondegreen” after people hearing the lyric “laid him on the green” as “lady mondregreen.” Don’t recall exactly what song that came from.
It was a poem ca 1765. Described in an article by Maria Konnikova in New Yorker Magazine as: “Her favorite verse began with the lines, “Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands / Oh, where hae ye been? / They hae slain the Earl Amurray, / And Lady Mondegreen.” Except they hadn’t. They left the poor Earl and “laid him on the green.” He was, alas, all by himself.”