(407) ABOUT THOSE LOUSY LYRIC SITES

Lousy!?

Christine here: One of the things that makes me a little crazy is how bad about crediting songwriters most of the lyric sites on the Internet that I've visited are.

They (the site or the poster) will say a song is Elvis Presley's or Glen Campbell's because that is the artist who most made the song famous, or maybe that's the version that's their personal favorite.

It's easy to believe that Elvis Presley wrote a lot of songs, but he co-wrote one, "All Shook Up."

Glen Campbell did write songs. He also first became famous with songs by Jimmy Webb.

Maybe this is the place to also say that a lot of the lyric sites are Wikis and people, well meaning I'm sure, are writing down lyrics as they hear them, and posting, which accounts for the different lyrics you may find if you search various sites.

As a girl, who was already very much into lyrics as poetry and as stories, I had a song lyric collection myself. I'd hear a song come on the radio, grab my pen and paper and start writing. Sometimes I had to listen for the song to play again for days before I got it all down.

I got "By the Time I Get To Phoenix," and "Witchita Line Man" down accurately due to the pace and pronunciation of the lyrics by the artist, Glen Campbell, but I recently learned I'd been singing very wrong lyrics to a Rolling Stone's song, never mind which one. By getting the lyrics wrong, I got the meaning wrong too.

Since I know how difficult it is to get the information as to who the original song writers of a song were (more about this on the next post), I do understand that the Wiki people and the lyric sites don't want to put that expectation on people, however, I wish they would at least write something like "as sung by..."