Alt: Lyrics On School Field Trips

DVD releases of movies often declare that they include "alternate endings," and "director's cuts." These alternate endings add a new take on the original production.

Likewise, old songs can be subjected to alternate lyrics and complete rewrites. The sense of the song is still there, if not the tune, but the message is completely different. I can recall vividly this song which we elementary students sung when we went on our yearly school fieldtrips. Those yearly fieldtrips were the only times I heard anyone singing these words:

Glory, glory, halleujah!
Teacher hit me with a ruler,
Met her at the door with a loaded forty-four,
And I ain't seen the old goat yet.

Admittedly the lyrics are childish. There are also alternate versions of this lyrical take, such as:

Glory, glory, halleujah!
Teacher beat me with a ruler,
I knocked her to the floor with a loaded forty-four,
And that teacher don't teach no more.

The first set of lyrics seems a bit less violent. The teacher is not explicitly shot or killed, but is merely missing. Perhaps he/she merely left the country.

In the second set of lyrics, the teacher has obviously met his/her demise.

Now, these songs were sung joyfully on fieldtrips with full knowledge of our teachers. Since we were on an outing, perhaps they gave us a bit of slack and overlooked the obvious violence in favor of good natured fun.

Today, I wonder if a child singing these words would be expelled.

Guns at school are no laughing matter. Threatening a teacher with a gun or shooting a teacher or student isn't funny. Too much of the world's violent ways have made their inroads into our schools. In recent years, one can recall many recent shootings and armed confrontations at various schools.

Add to the fact that even younger students resort to violence and shooting to settle scores. Somehow, the innocence of it all has long passed us by. For us, it was all in fun and our teachers understood that. Today, singing songs like we did at school sponsored events would likely today get us expelled and even charged with making terroristic threats.

I guess too much has happened since I was in elementary school.