Has Johnny been wrong all of these years?
Johnny Horton’s “Sinking of the Bismarck”
On a recent drive back from College Station, Texas, Johnny Horton’s “Sinking of the Bismarck” came on the car radio. I’ve owned a copy of the song for years, and have enjoyed it and its more widely known cousin “Battle of New Orleans,” but something has always bugged me about while I sing along.
In the first verse, when describing the Bismarck, Johnny Horton describes the Bismarck as having “guns as big as steers and shells as big as trees.” The first hundred times I heard the song, I could never quick nail that line correctly, and it took me a long time to figure out why. I think the description is inverted. The guns should be described as being as big as trees and the shells as big as steers. Guns are an obvious comparison to trees, and shells are much more similar to a blunt shell than a tree.
My copy is from the Time Life Classic Country: Great Story Songs collection, which is great, but substitutes some lesser known recordings of popular songs, so I looked for other versions that might be correct. Every other version and lyric I could find has the same guns/steers inversion. Of course, while searching down that rabbit trail, I found that at least a few others have had the same thought. Over at Banjo Hangout, they even photoshopped up an illustrative picture:
Much like “Battle of New Orleans,” the historic details of the song are not exceptionally accurate. The first verse is basically entirely incorrect:
In May of nineteen forty-one the war had just begun
The Germans had the biggest ship, they had the biggest guns
The Bismarck was the fastest ship that ever sailed the sea
On her deck were guns as big as steers and shells as big as trees
Each of these sentences is incorrect. The war had been going for almost two years during the Bismarck’s fateful sortie. The Bismarck was not the largest, most powerful or even the fastest ship afloat in 1941. And Bismarck was even spelled “Bismark” when the song was initially released, so the fact checking was not great at the time.
The song itself was commissioned to accompany a 1960 picture of the same title, and Johnny Horton died a few months later in a November 1960 Car accident before anyone evidently asked him about his flawed description.
However, this experience does serve as a reminder about thinking and in particular original thinking. With so many people alive, and with so many thoughts being uploaded to the internet everyday, the odds of having a completely original idea are minuscule, even when about a trivial flaw in minor hit almost 60 years old. Something beyond creativity is needed for ideas to be successful and rise above the din of recycled and repeated tropes to have an impact. Solving that riddle is probably the toughest problem facing our society today.
