During the folk music boom of the 1950s, “Rock Island Line,” originally a Southern convict song, became a big hit.  Everyone knew the chorus:

The Rock Island Line is a mighty good road
The Rock Island Line is the road to ride
The Rock Island Line is a mighty good road
If you want to ride you gotta ride it like you find it
Get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island Line!

It was so big a hit that the humorist Stan Freberg was able to mock it, claiming that what he heard in the last line (and was greatly puzzled by) was “Get your chicken at the station for the Rock Island Line.”

Lots of song lyrics have been creatively misheard, of course.  Besides “Rock Island Line,” there’s the much older folk ballad “The Elfin Knight,” in which “rosemary and thyme” became (in American versions) “let every rose grow merry in time.”  But sometimes what’s misheard is complete nonsense, and for this phenomenon, there’s a term, “mondegreen,” a coinage datable to the November 1954 issue of Harper’s Magazine.  Among its articles was a humorous piece by Sylvia Wright, claiming that when she was a little girl, her mother read ancient ballads aloud to her, and that the first stanza of one of them, “The Bonny Earl of Murray”—

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye bin?
They hae slain the Earl o’ Murray,
And laid him on the green—

sounded thus to her childish ear:

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye bin?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

Wright goes on to riff amusingly on the completely non-existent Lady Mondegreen, her apparel (“a dark green dress embroidered with light green leaves outlined in gold”), her devotion to that brave fellow the Earl (“she ran right out of her castle and into the forest to be with him without even stopping to change her best dress”), and her tragic death (“An arrow had pierced her throat . . . She was holding the Earl’s hand.  It made me cry”). 

“Since no one else has thought up a word” for this kind of thing, Wright proposes “mondegreen,” then records many further mondegreens, all of them in her view better than the original.  There’s “Hizeray,” for example, to all appearances a specially terrifying Etruscan warrior in Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome.  Therein we hear that Lars Porsena

      . . .  named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East and west and south and north,
     To summon Hizeray.

My favorite of Wright’s mondegreens is the patriotic “Donzerly Light,” which, set on a lonely promontory, surmounted by the Stars and Stripes and illuminated by bombs and rockets, is “where you go to pledge the legions to the flag.”

If you choose to hear “The Bonny Earl of Murray” rightly, as opposed to wrightly, performed, you might go to a soulful Youtube version accompanied by misty photographs of Scotland.  But after learning of Lady Mondegreen, I for one prefer the ballad with her in it, bravery, devotion, green dress and all.