I’ve commented in the past how I am a constant user of IMDB.com to lookup information about movies and TV shows. I also constantly look up the lyrics to songs.  Unfortunately, I haven’t found a one-stop source for song lyrics the way IMBD is for movies, but Yahoo is becoming a pretty good source, but it’s still frustratingly difficult to navigate, limited, slow, and chock full of ads.

Some times even when I know exactly what words the artist has said, I often have no idea what on earth they are talking about.  Last week, I was out driving with Maggie when Walking in Memphis by Marc Cohn came on the radio.  It’s a catchy song from 1991 that has held up remarkably well despite being 16 years old.  You can’t really say the same for (Everything I Do) I Do It For You by Bryan Adams which was the top song of the year and always reminds me of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, or Set Adrift on a Memory Bliss by P.M. Dawn which I really liked at the time, but haven’t heard played ever since.  Walking in Memphis‘s lyrics seem pretty simple, are enunciated clearly, and have good volume, but every time the chorus came around I always found myself singing “Walking in Memphis, walking with my feet ten feet off of ...bleah… [something unintelligible].”.  Not to mention, the song opens with an equally quizzical “W.C. behind me, won’t you look down over me,” some kind of strange reference to a British bathroom.

Maggie thought it odd, too, and couldn’t figure out what Marc Cohn was trying to say.  So, when I got home, I pulled up the lyrics online and discovered the first line was “W.C. Handy” and the chorus was “ten feet off of Beale.” Unfortunately, knowing the words still didn’t give me a clue as to what the lines meant.  Wasn’t Beale the name of the demon from Diablo II?  This made less sense than thinking that the subject character had just left the first class passenger section on the plane without having visited the loo.

Fortunately, there is a great site for looking up the meanings of songs, called Songfacts.  And even more fortunate was that it has a page for Walking in Memphis; apparently I wasn’t the only one left scratching my head.  Here, I discovered that W.C. Handy was a well known blues musician who is also the subject of a blues festival, named, of course, The W.C. Handy Festival.  Handy had also recorded a song titled the “Beale Street Blues,” named for a popular street for blues musicians in Memphis.

In addition to great bits of information and trivia about popular songs, Songfact.com has a regular quiz where you can win a T-Shirt.  The quiz is usually pretty tough and only one person can win each month, but it’s fun to test your knowledge.  You can also peruse the past quizzes to gather some other interesting pieces of trivia.  It’s definitely worth checking out.

"On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair. Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air.”
Don Henley from The Eagle’s Hotel California