Eclectic Company: The Singing Bee and Mondegreens

I don't know about you, but even though it makes me a little sick with apprehension to watch them, I love to see people try to sing in public. I love competitions, and I get a kick out of hearing others singing for prizes. Strangely, I don't do karaoke. I mean, I don't hang out at bars where they offer karaoke machines (though I'm going to rectify that mistake over the next month), I don't sing it at parties, and I don't even notice or think about it, except when it's in the middle of a movie or TV show, when it drifts into my vision without any activity on my part.

That's what happened a little while ago with Country Music Television's "The Singing Bee." One minute I was clicking through AMC and Lifetime and Bravo and TNT and TBS, hoping for a movie I'd only have seen a half dozen times, and the next I landed on CMT and heard what was really truly godawful caterwauling to an almost unrecognizable old country tune. The singer was clearly not a singer in anyone's estimation, and she was vocalizing a good three-and-a-half notes off the tune vamping behind her, but she was cheerfully wailing away, wearing a big old nametag, caressing a cordless microphone as if she was a bonafied diva with a capital "D," and she was ignoring the sounds of a zapping buzzer that signaled every wrong word she sang. "Real folks singing," I thought, happily. And settled in to watch the show.

The premise seemed simple enough — a live band and various singers (themselves of only average musical chops) introed songs on the fly — chosen seemingly at random from a wide timeline of mostly country hits, announced by Melissa Peterman, a comedic actress who used to be on the series "Reba" — and then the pros stopped singing, which signaled the contestants to chime in to fill in the musical blanks.

But it was a little trickier than that. The competitions throughout the half hour were variations on the theme: Sing the next line of the lyric after the band stopped playing; sing all the lines on the teleprompter or karaoke screen filling in missing words indicated by dashes; bid on how many or how few words they'd get correctly in the next song; sing alternating phrases in a single song with a partner, until one of them was outsung by the other; and finally, for the night's highest scoring contestant, sing one missing line from a song and then one missing line from another song, until correctly singing five out of seven tries, for a top prize of $10,000 and a trophy.

I was laid up recovering from surgery for a couple of weeks, right smack dab during a "Singing Bee" marathon, so I watched a bunch of episodes back to back. Settling in with snacks and drinks, I winced at every wrong note, and marveled at one woman with a mild accent and the look of an Indian from Bombay, who it seemed knew every word to every song in every musical genre thrown at her (CMT says the music is 60 percent country and 40 percent other pop genres). It certainly took courage to get up to sing, especially for all those folks with no musical ability whose unlovely sounds were cringe-making. But the harder thing was getting the lyrics precisely right. If the singer added a word, or left out a word, or sang the right words in the wrong order, s/he'd get dinged, and maybe a rival would get a chance at it, their ability enhanced by hearing the screw up who went first. "You don't have to sing it well, you just have to sing it right," host Peterman said in words to that effect throughout the show's teasers. You should catch an episode or two. Details at Singing Bee.

One reason I was fascinated with the "Singing Bee" is because I know I can't play fill in the musical blanks myself. After all, I learned the songs I know before there were CDs, before you could really understand the lyrics to popular songs, back in the day when most of us guessed at or kind of made up half of the words buried under the heavy bass and drums and keyboards and guitar solos of songs such as "Louie, Louie" and "I Am The Walrus." We thought we were singing the lyrics, but mostly, we sang "mondegreens," that phenomenon in which you mishear and then misquote poetry or advertising slogans or song lyrics, so named in 1954 by writer Sylvia Wright, in an article in Harper's Bazaar, in which she recounted her own mishearing of the balladic poetry line "And laid him on the green" as "And Lady Mondegreen." These gaffes have been called mondegreens following Ms. Wright's coinage ever since.

Now I know you know what I mean. You've heard kids say "I feed the pigeons " instead of "I pledge allegiance," haven't you? And Creedence Clearwater Revival's famous line, "There's a bathroom on the right," instead of the actual lyric to "Bad Moon Rising." And my all time favorite — "just call me angel of the morning, angel/just brush my teeth before you leave me" — from "Angel of the Morning," written by the inimitable Chip Taylor (who also wrong "Wild Thing"), better known to you all, perhaps, as actor Jon Voight's craggier brother. Taylor, of course, wrote "just brush my cheek before you leave me." But isn't the mondegreen better than the original, for entertainment value, at least? Send your favorite mondegreens to me at and I'll quote them in an upcoming column.