This is the twenty-third in a series of examinations of music legends and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the previous twenty-two.

Let’s begin!

MUSIC LEGEND: When Pat Boone recorded Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” the lyrics were re-written and toned down.

STATUS: False

In the last installment of Music Legends Revealed, we took a look at the misconception that Pat Boone changed Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” to “Isn’t That a Shame.”

Today, we look at a different misconception regarding Pat Boone’s role regarding the sanitization of a rock ‘n’ roll song.

Once again, like last week, we should note that one of the more embarrassing facets of popular music history was the period in time when songs written and/or first performed by black artists were then re-recorded by white singers for the “white audience.”

As the white audience was obviously much larger, artists would typically lose out on a good deal of sales (and therefore, royalties) from this practice.

Little Richard’s 1955 song (which began rising in the charts in 1956), “Tutti Frutti” did very well for Little Richard…

but even better for Pat Boone, who did a cover version in 1956 that outperformed Little Richard’s version on the U.S. pop charts (Boone ended up at #12 while Little Richard stalled at #17, which was still a good performance for a so-called “black” song).

In any event, just like how Boone supposedly had the title of “Ain’t That a Shame” changed to “Isn’t That a Shame,” “Tutti Frutti” was also supposedly sanitized for the “white” crowd.

And, in a way, it is true, “Tutti Frutti” WAS sanitized, lyrically, but it wasn’t for the “white” crowd, per se, it was for pretty much EVERY crowd, as the lyric changes happened before Little Richard ever recorded the tune!

When Producer Bumps Blackwell decided to bring Little Richard into the studio to record “Tutti Frutti,” he knew the song could be a hit, but the original lyrics were a bit too much for a general audience.

So Rockwell hired songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie to “fix” the lyrics, and she changed the chorus from

Tutti Frutti, good booty,
If it don’t fit, don’t force it
You can grease it
make it easy

to the now famous…

Tutti Frutti, all rooty!
Tutti Frutti, all rooty

So yeah, the song was sanitized, but it wasn’t upon being recorded by Pat Boone!

MUSIC LEGEND: Bob Dylan lifted a number of lines from a Japanese novel for songs on his album “Love and Theft.”

STATUS: True

Bob Dylan’s album “Love and Theft” continued the strong “comeback,” of sorts, that Dylan had began with 1997’s Time Out of Mind (which ended up winning Album of the Year at the Grammys).

The album was specifically called “Love and Theft,” not Love and Theft, which is clearly a reference to Eric Lott’s book Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.

In Lott’s book, he discusses how, at the heart of blackface was the appropriation of another culture’s, well, culture.

And in Dylan’s album, Dylan sings songs in a variety of different genres extending throughout the last hundred plus years of American music.

In one song, “High Water (for Charlie Patton),” Dylan basically takes most of Charlie Patton’s song “High Water” and writes a new song around it.

So it perhaps is not much of a surprise that it later was revealed that Dylan had appropriated a large number of lines from a book into the lyrics of the songs on the album.

The book was a Japanese novel called Confessions of a Yakuza, written by Junichi Saga (with English translations by John Bester).

Here are a handful of the instances where Dylan appropriated lines from Saga’s novel (it happened about 12 times on the album)…

On the song “Floater,” Dylan sings:

My old man, he’s like some feudal lord, Got more lives than a cat

In the book, Saga writes:

My old man would sit there like a feudal lord

In the song “Po’ Boy,” Dylan sang:

My mother was a daughter of a wealthy farmer, / My father was a travelin’ salesman, I never met him. / When my mother died, my uncle took me and he ran a funeral parlor. / He did a lot of nice things for me and I won’t forget him.

In the book, Saga wrote:

My mother…was the daughter of a wealthy farmer…(she) died when I was eleven…my father was a traveling salesman…I never met him. (my uncle) was a nice man, I won’t forget him…After my mother died, I decided it’d be best to go and try my luck there.

In the song “Honest With Me,” Dylan sings:

Some things are too terrible to be true, / I won’t come here no more if it bothers you.

In the book, Saga writes:

I won’t come anymore if it bothers you

In the song “Lonesome Day Blues,” Dylan sings:

Samantha Brown lived in my house for about four or five months. / Don’t know how it looked to other people, I never slept with her even once.

In the book, Saga writes:

Just because she was in the same house didn’t mean we were living together as man and wife…I don’t know how it looked to other people, but I never even slept with her–not once.

Thanks to Chris Johnson for the comparisons! Check out more of Chris’s comparisons here.

As you can see, it’s pretty clear, but at the same time, we’re talking about 12 snippets from the book sprinkled over the entirety of the album, an album that is specifically ABOUT appropriating other people’s stuff.

So is it odd?

Certainly.

But I also don’t think it’s THAT big of a deal, and Saga went on the record as saying he didn’t mind (and he liked the bump in sales his book received when the news got out about Dylan using lines from his book), so it really doesn’t rise beyond “Huh, that’s odd.”

Thanks again to Chris Johnson for the line comparisons!

MUSIC LEGEND: Clem Snide’s “Moment in the Sun” is a parody of Jewel.

STATUS: True

After using the Foo Fighter’s song “Next Year” for the first season of the TV show Ed, the producers went looking to a slightly less famous band, Clem Snide, for the theme song for the second season.

The New York band, which existed mostly as an outlet for singer/songwriter Eef Barzelay’s music, offered up three new songs, but the producers ultimately asked them for a song the group had already done called “Moment in the Sun.”

The upbeat tune served as the theme song for Ed for the second season of the show, but the Foo Fighters returned the next season (and the show’s fourth, and last, season).

What’s particularly interesting about the producers’ choice of “Moment in the Sun” is that the song was written as a parody of a typical Jewel song (circa Jewel’s first album, Pieces of You)!

In an interview with Gregg Sparks of The Daily Cardinal (college paper for the University of Wisconsin-Madison) in 2002, Barzelay explains:

It’s not so much about Jewel, I guess. When I wrote the song, it was about two or three years ago and I just kept hearing about Jewel. She was talking about how she lived in her van and all the struggle and strife that she went through. So I decided to try to write a song from Jewel’s perspective, just imagine that I was Jewel and in the van there, with hopes and dreams and all that. I was just making fun of Jewel, I guess, and making fun of myself.

And when you look at it from that perspective, suddenly you can EASILY see the song as a parody of a naively earnest song…

When it’s my moment in the sun
Oh, how beautiful I’ll be
but in a normal sort of way
Like I am you and you are me

‘Cause I have a lot of things to say
and you’d be wise to listen good
I think that hunger, war and death
are bringin’ everybody down

laaa lala laaaaa
lala laaaaaaa lala
laaaaaa laaaaa

When it’s my moment in the sun
I’ll share my problems with the world
and psychosomatically I’ll sing
to God and all His pretty girls

laaa lala laaaaa
lala laaaaaaa lala
laaaaaa laaaaa

That’s actually kind of biting, isn’t it?

And it’s pretty funny that that was the song that the executives decided to go with.

Thanks to Eef Barzelay and Gregg Sparks for the information!

Okay, that’s it for this week!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com