Altering lyrics? Do you do it?

jnorris235

Well-known member
Joined
Jul 9, 2016
Messages
93
Reaction score
2
Location
Herefordshire
“Baby it’s cold outside” is in the news and many other lyrics are contentious or sexist. A rousing Irish song I like goes “some say the devil is dead...some say he rose again and joined the British Army”. So - sympathy with the original rebel cause, but I am British and live in the town where the SAS are.

There’ll be songs you wont sing, some you daren’t but “updating them” to a new cause is that a thing?

I appreciate some will say “just get a life” but, especially with songs from the 60’s onwards, do you re-version them, is it legal?

I’ve certainly rewritten Joleen as a lesbian song!
 
I sing for me. If it makes me uncomfortable I will change it or not sing it.
And I was amused that our local mall disagreed with the furor over Baby it's Cold Outside. It seamed to be playing every other song while I picked up presents for the family.
 
Sitting in my porch swing
Strummin’ My four string
Making up verses as I go along
It don’t really matter
If they’re gooder or badder
I’ll take Jimmy’s music
and make it my own

Updating songs, rewriting lyrics, and repurposing tunes are a thing, but they’re not a new thing. Music is not stonework. The times they are a changing, and so are the verses.


  • Americans repurposed “God Save the King” as “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” in 1831
  • Canada now commands patriot love in “all of us” not just in her sons.
  • Cee Lo Imagined all religion instead of no religion as ideal
  • Paul Simon can’t decide if everything is better or worse in black and white.
  • Jimmy Buffet probably hasn’t sung Margaritaville as written in decades.
  • Weird Al. Just Weird Al.

Music (and life) are all about context, and contexts change both on the small scale (Ireland to your SAS town) and large scale (the Baby It’s Cold Outside conversation)

I don’t think anybody has serious problems with the loving tributes and parodies.

If you’re going to fix a lyric then know your audience and be deliberate and careful to make the point that you want to make. If you don’t know your audience, especially if your audience is broad, and if you don’t want to engage in social conversation then go elsewhere.

Don’t fear offending people, but don’t offend people casually. Make sure you understand what you’re singing, if it may be offensive to your audience, and why. Then be deliberate about if that’s a point you want to make.

Updating your Irish song is good because it directly insults your audience, and that’s not your point. Know thy audience

Updating BICO is good if you want to make a point about consent.

Updating Imagine was bad since Cee Lo didn’t intend to make the point he made. He was just trying to avoid controversy, and you can’t mess with Lennon’s message without making people talk.

There definitely are songs that I won’t sing because external context gives them meaning that I don’t intend. In several cases this was meaning that I didn’t even have the context to understand just from the lyrics.

And there are some songs with lyrics I find vile and yet are so compelling I love and sing them anyway. Looking at you, Shaggy ;)
 
Being a big Tom Petty fan, I was happy to hear him change the lyrics of "Friend of the Devil" in a live performance, covering the song. Referring to a child, the original lyric went :

Got a wife in Chino, and one in Cherokee, first one says she's got my child, but IT don't look like me

He changed it to say:

Got a wife in Chino, and one in Cherokee, first one says she's got my child, but SHE don't look like me

A small change to be sure, but I always disliked the cold & impersonal reference to a child as an IT, as did Tom apparently.
 
Last edited:
I would sometimes wish I had the inspiration to rewrite som lyrics.

I recently learned "walking my baby back home".
Lyrics: " She says if I try, to kiss her she'll cry. I dry her tears through the night".
Omg. Hope that they are tears of joy or sentimentality, but it sound so much worse than "baby its cold outside". I considered coming up with something different, but didn't have the time/inspiration.

I say whatever suits the audience you are playing for, and/or what you are comfortable with. You can lean on thats how they wrote songs back then if you are comfortable with that and you expect your audience to understand.
Or you can change it if you like. I would definately change lyrics if I believed that someone in the target audience would be genuinely offended.
You can't predict everyone who might get offended by something historcally conditioned, then on the other hand I am not a fan of keeping historical lyrics just to piss people off.
 
Last edited:
I've changed the lyrics to several songs that I've worked up and put in my book. The changes are usually small, one or two words or part of a line. I've eliminated stuff like profanities, blasphemies/falsehoods about God, drug consumption references, overt sexual references, cruel references and I've reworded clunky lines to make them flow better. The songs I've changed are a small percentage of the total songs in my book and if I were to perform them, I doubt that many people would even notice the change. I won't update a song to make it current or for a new cause. I'd find doing that kind of annoying or even off-putting.

(BTW, I'm on the side of the argument that thinks the umbrage over "Baby It's Cold Outside" is ridiculous. I take more offense over "Santa Baby" and I don't hear complaints about that song.)
 
Last edited:
Ha, I don't think I'd play Petty's "Get to the point...roll another joint" at a family event, or Friend of the Devil in church! ;)
 
Ha, I don't think I'd play Petty's "Get to the point...roll another joint" at a family event, or Friend of the Devil in church! ;)

I remember hearing that line from the Petty song on the radio. The station I was listening to had an altered version of the song where the word "joint" was slurred so it kind of sounded like the word but it wasn't actually saying the word.
 
Go ahead, change the lyrics.

Sometimes I (and lots of other folks) have done that, because of forgotten or misheard lyrics, other times to update the song. I've done that with Eve of Destruction. Just give credit where credit is due - With Eve of Destruction, I say "Here's a song written by P.F. Sloane in 1965. I changed a few of the words - unfortunately, it is still germane."
 
I do it all the time. I try to make them more relevant to my audience.
 
I never change a lyric to be politically correct or socially accepted.
I may change it if I forget the words, or if I want it to refer more specifically to me, but to suit someone else, get lost! I'm singing it, dont like it dont listen!
As for Baby its cold outside, the ones that object are probably cold inside........La lal la la
 
Being a big Tom Petty fan, I was happy to hear him change the lyrics of "Friend of the Devil" in a live performance, covering the song. Referring to a child, the original lyric went :

Got a wife in Chino, and one in Cherokee, first one says she's got my child, but IT don't look like me

He changed it to say:

Got a wife in Chino, and one in Cherokee, first one says she's got my child, but SHE don't look like me

A small change to be sure, but I always disliked the cold & impersonal reference to a child as an IT, as did Tom apparently.

Yet we will use the phrase" Is it a boy? Is it a girl?" when asking the sex of a newborn, what if you didnt know the sex of an unborn child? How would you refer to "it".
 
This thread got me thinking. Whenever we play “Bad Moon Rising” I have a hard time singing the correct lyrics. Ever since our jam leader told us that her kids always sang “there’s a bathroom on the right” instead of “there’s a bad moon on the rise.” Cracks me up every time we play it. I can’t get the “bathroom” lyric out of my head.
 
Last edited:
I would sometimes wish I had the inspiration to rewrite som lyrics.

I recently learned "walking my baby back home".
Lyrics: " She says if I try, to kiss her she'll cry. I dry her tears through the night".
Omg. Hope that they are tears of joy or sentimentality, but it sound so much worse than "baby its cold outside". I considered coming up with something different, but didn't have the time/inspiration.

I say whatever suits the audience you are playing for, and/or what you are comfortable with. You can lean on thats how they wrote songs back then if you are comfortable with that and you expect your audience to understand.
Or you can change it if you like. I would definately change lyrics if I believed that someone in the target audience would be genuinely offended.
You can't predict everyone who might get offended by something historcally conditioned, then on the other hand I am not a fan of keeping historical lyrics just to piss people off.

I love the song, but never sing that second verse.
 
I will sometimes change the sex of the singer from female to male, but not always. Some songs, like House Of The Rising Sun, should have the singer remain singing from the woman's point of view. Josh White, Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan . . . all sang in the persona of a woman trapped in a life of prostitution. Eric Burdon learned the song from Bob Dylan's first album, but, not feeling comfortable singing from the woman's point of view, he changed, "being so young and foolish poor girl, let a rambler lead me astray," to "being so young and foolish poor boy, let a gambler lead me astray" and lost (for me anyway) much of the effectiveness of the song.

I will sometimes leave out a verse that I don't feel comfortable singing in an otherwise great song. In Loudon Wainwright III's Dump The Dog, I drop the verse that goes:

Oh my good girl loves me madly
And my bad girl is a flirt
I'll take the good with the bad gladly
And I'll treat them both like dirt


I have changed words accidentally. I recorded a Fred Eaglesmith song High Heels In The Rain and changed, "In the morning she wakes up and draws back the curtains, looks out on a brand new day," to "In the morning she wakes up and draws back the drapes and looks out on a brand new day," purely by accident. Since I discovered my mistake, I always perform it using "curtains". Not a big mistake, but. . .
 
Last edited:
Why not, nobody owns words, if it fits better, in your mind, go for it. ;)

I've changed words, not that I would 'sing' very often - I'm the one 'perfoming' it, so I'll do it how I want to. :)
 
Really interesting discussion, thanks for your thoughts.
And the irony of me asking - as if anybody will ever hear me play!!
I may post some different lyrics here just for the helluvit.
 
I never change a lyric to be politically correct or socially accepted.
I may change it if I forget the words, or if I want it to refer more specifically to me, but to suit someone else, get lost! I'm singing it, dont like it dont listen!
As for Baby its cold outside, the ones that object are probably cold inside........La lal la la
The summer before last I was asked to play at a church picnic. I play Janis Joplin's Mercedes Benz. It is the first song in my playlist as it is a good one for me to warm up on and get the vocal chords working. I've already changed the words "color tv" to "HD tv", and "dialing for dollars" to "'merica's got talent," to make it more relevant. So the lady who had asked me to play wanted to see the play list. I've always thought that song was a religious song, and that it calls out those who pray for material gifts vs those who pray for spiritual gifts. But regardless, she didn't like it. Maybe it hit too close to home for some of the picnickers. Anyway, like I said, it is a good warm up, so I suggested that I change "oh lord" to "papa." It fits. So she was good with that. People seemed to like it. But it really didn't make any difference to me. I mean, it is such a small thing. It is just hard for me to get started. Once I get going I'm okay. That song is my crutch. It worked out fine.
 
Why not, nobody owns words, if it fits better, in your mind, go for it. ;)

I've changed words, not that I would 'sing' very often - I'm the one 'perfoming' it, so I'll do it how I want to. :)

Nobody owns individual words, but the combination of words that make up the lyrics to a song are owned by the composer. That's the whole basis for copyright laws.

I don't believe you'd get in trouble for changing a few words, but they are the property of the composer.

I often wonder about the work of Homer & Jethro or Weird Al. Do they get permission from the composer?

I know the owners of the rights to Oscar Brown Jr's Snake have asked Donald Trump to stop using their father's lyrics. Good Luck with that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPKg4_uq2Eo
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom