Arkansas took control

Once I have misheard the lyrics of a song, my brain can be quite insistent on continuing to hear them that way, even after I have been informed of what they "really" are. For example, despite knowing now that the phrase repeated in the chorus of the David Bowie song "Five Years" is -- as should have been obvious! -- five years, I continue to hear it as bupkis: "Bupkis, that's all we've got. We've got bupkis, what a surprise . . . ." Of course bupkis is a Yiddish-derived Americanism unlikely to have been in Bowie's active vocabulary, and "Five Years" is, you know, the name of the song, but the part of my brain that listens to music remains unconvinced.

Another particularly stubborn mishearing is the beginning of the Moody Blues song "Blue World" -- which, as you may not be aware, begins "Arkansas took control, took control of me." Apparently so many people mishear "Arkansas" as "heart and soul" that the latter version actually made it into the liner notes, an error which has been repeated on roughly 100% of Internet lyrics sites!

Looking at the context, we can easily see that "heart and soul" is an error.

Arkansas took control,
Took control of me.
Paid my dues, spread the news,
Hands across the sea.

Obviously your heart and soul can't take control of you; they are you. Just as obviously, this is about getting involved in some sort of political rannygazoo -- dues-paying and news-spraying not being activities noted for their soulfulness. Since my immersion in the music of the Moody Blues began quite abruptly in September 1992, a few months before Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, was elected president, I naturally associated this political "Arkansas" with him. Never mind that "Blue World" was released in England in 1983, nine years before Clinton's election and 17 years before his party began to be thought of as the "Blue" faction; one can't get too hung up on linearity when it comes to interpreting lyrics.

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A further dimension was added to the Arkansas theme by a bluegrass song I first encountered around the same time as the Moody Blues: "Down in the Arkin'," as performed by a local Thompson, Ohio, bluegrass band called Barb and Uncle Dave's Pure Quill on their album There's a Place in Thompson. (It turns out not to be true that everything is on YouTube now.) It consists of a series of doggerel verses, with this refrain, slightly different from the classic Jimmy Driftwood version:

Down in the Arkin', down in the Arkin', down in the Arkin-saw,
The prettiest girls I ever did see were down in the Arkin-saw

For some reason -- perhaps it was the covert influence of the hidden word ark -- I thought of this as being sung by the angels in Genesis 6 who looked down from heaven and "saw the daughters of men, that they were fair" -- hence the reference to pretty girls down in the Arkansas. "Arkansas" then became, in my mind, a name for the corrupt antediluvian world, and the first line of the refrain became "Down in the Ark, and down in the Ark, and down in the Arkansas" -- directly paralleling the Beatles' line "Back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR."

Just as "US" (the United States) turns out to be the beginning of "USSR" (the enemy of the United States), so "Ark" (of Noah) turns out to be the beginning of "Arkansas" (Noah's enemies). And the line about "the prettiest girls I ever did see" parallels "the Ukraine girls really knock me out" etc. The implication is that the US is not so different from the USSR, and the Ark is really just another Arkansas.

Once "Arkansas" had come to be associated with the world destroyed by the Flood, it was only natural to reinterpret the "Blue World" of the Moody Blues song as a reference to that Flood, a connection that was reinforced by the release a few years later of the heavily advertised movie Waterworld.

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At this point, the synchronicity fairies have chimed in. I just checked the Wikipedia article on "Back in the USSR" to see what year it was released, and I found this 1984 quote from Paul McCartney.

I just liked the idea of Georgia girls and talking about places like the Ukraine as if they were California, you know? It was also hands across the water, which I'm still conscious of. 'Cause they like us out there [in Soviet Russia], even though the bosses in the Kremlin may not.

"Hands across the water" is one of McCartney's own lines, from "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" (1971), but it ties in nicely with the "hands across the sea" in "Blue World."

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The Arkansas/Flood connection was reinforced and expanded by another Jimmy Driftwood song, "Tennessee Stud," which I believe I first heard from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, although it may have been Barb and Uncle Dave again. These days my favorite rendition is Suzanna Choffel's, which captures some of the subtle unearthliness of the lyrics about a horse "the color of the sun."

The song begins thus:

Along about eighteen and twenty-five
I left Tennessee very much alive.
I never woulda got through the Arkansas mud
If I hadn't been a-ridin' on the Tennessee stud.

Why "the Arkansas mud"? Because the floodwaters have only just receded from Arkansas. Almost everything has been killed by the Flood, but the singer (presumably either Noah or one of his sons) is still "very much alive." It follows that "Tennessee" must mean the Ark and is actually "Ten-Asea" -- a reference to the eight human beings and two horses which it saved. Of course there were a lot of other animals as well, but the horses -- the Ten-Asea Stud and the Ten-Asea Mare -- were considered part of the family.

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This idea of a flooded Arkansas was already firmly cemented in my mind when, in 1999, John Linnell released his solo concept album State Songs, including the astonishingly appropriate "Arkansas."

The song is about a ship called the Arkansas which is "the exact dimensions and the shape of the state whose name she bore," and the final verse asks,

When the rising tide engulfs the shore
And the waves roll over Arkansas,
Will the ship return to anchor there and replace the sunken state?

For the ship was shaped like Arkansas,
And the hull was formed without a flaw.
Every detail had been reproduced on a scale of one to one.

So once again we have Arkansas sinking beneath the waves, its place being taken by an Ark which is not in the end so different from what it is replacing.