What kind of pie?

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

I’m guilty of just making up words to songs when I can’t quite make out what the singer is saying. My favorite examples of this are from a couple of songs from the 1970s. I swear that Steve Miller, in his song “Big Jet Airliner” he was saying “Big armchair Carolina” instead of “Big ol’ jet airliner” in that song.

I don’t know why I thought that, but it got in my head, it just stayed there.

Same with David Bowie’s “Suffragette City,” where I thought the lyrics were, “Lay it on me man, ‘cause I ain’t that kind of chicken, so you can not be seated.” Now, in my defense, that word salad doesn’t make a lot less sense than the actual words, which are, “Don’t lean on me man, ‘cause you can’t afford the ticket. I’m back on Suffragette City.” So, I didn’t know what he was saying back in the day, and I’m still not sure what any of

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From page A4

that means.

But those are songs where I just didn’t have the internet 40 years ago to look up the words. What I’m really concerned with here is that there’s a popular Christmas song that I’m pretty sure has a pretty significant obscenity.

I’m talking, of course, about Brenda Lee’s 1958 classic “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” Right there in the first verse, she sings, “Rockin’ around the Christmas tree, let the Christmas spirit ring. Later we’ll have some” — and this is where I have my concerns.

Of course, the lyrics sheet says she says “pumpkin pie.”

And maybe she does, and maybe I’ve just seen too many R-rated movies, but I swear she does not say “pumpkin” there. At best, she says “puckin” but it really sounds like she drops the proverbial “F-dash-dashdash” word, to quote young Ralphie from “A Christmas Story” (and I don’t mean “fudge”). Seriously, give it a listen and tell me I’m wrong… My best evidence (other than, you know, hearing it) is that in every single cover version of the song since the original, the cover artist always goes out of their way to over-pronounce “PUMP-kin.”

And now I can’t un-hear it…