…but what if the million monkeys are peaking over one anothers’ shoulders?

The Internet is a source for a great many good things, as long as you don’t care about accuracy.

Most recent evidence: I’m figuring out the chords to a Loudon Wainwright song (White Winos, if you’re curious) and it’s one of these songs where I have trouble keeping the verses straight. This isn’t because they’re sort of random, the way that (say) Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone is sort of random (in that you could easily swap around bits and pieces of the verses and stand a good chance of no one noticing); there’s a story there, and the order’s important. It’s because each verse has a number in the first couple of lines (from one to five), and I can’t keep the numbers straight, and that throws me off.

…what? There’s like 120 different permutations of five numbers, how am I supposed to know which one to use?

Anyway. As I’m testing my chords/fingerings, I figure it would be nice if I had the lyrics in front of me. And lo and behold, I’m on the Internet, where lyrics sites have flourished on and off for a dozen years or more. I’m enough of a geezer to remember the WUSTL lyrics FTP archive, which might even predate Nevada and the original on-line guitar archive; there were lawsuits and such in the 90s, and then some agreement was reached. Or possibly people just decamped to Switzerland. Anyhow, there’s whole bunches of lyrics sites.

And they all crib from each other.

This is obvious, in the same way that it’s obvious when students are copying off each other: there may only be one way to get something right, but there’s a myriad wrong answers, and the mistakes you make tend to be idiosyncratic. If I see two students who’ve both managed to square 6 and get 32, I get suspicious; likewise, when every lyrics site I check omits the first verse (what, was the line …when she was alive too much of a downer?), then I begin to wonder.

Of course the problems don’t end there; the lyrics on each site are shot through with (the same) errors. Let’s looks at the second verse (which is of course listed as the first):

mother liked her white wine

she’d have a glass or two

almost every single night

after her day was through



san se chardonnay chaiblie

pinot gris jiot

just to take the edge of

just to get the glow

So OK, we’re drinking white wine; the “Chardonnay” makes that clear. But “san se”? “chaiblie”? “jiot”?! I’d almost be impressed they got “Pinot Gris”, except for that “jiot” hanging around afterwards. (The corrent lines there? “Sancerre, Chardonnay, Chablis, Pinot Grigio”. Googling on that string actually gets you to a correct and complete version of the lyrics.) The “of” for “off” at the end of the penultimate line is common enough to be forgivable, but the list of (really rather famous) wine types? Never.

I almost wonder if this is how the lyrics sites get around copyright. The original lyrics may well be protected, but does that protection extend to obviously wrong transcriptions?

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