Everybody’s Talkin’: Fred Neil
This song, written by Fred, appears on the album Fred Neil released in 1966. The song was re-released in 1969 by Harry Nilsson for the movie Midnight Cowboy. It won a Grammy.
Today we’re celebrating Fred’s birthday! He would have been 76.
Explore posts in the same categories: Music
March 16, 2012 at 9:36 am
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?avlvnknyemamke5
March 16, 2012 at 11:06 am
Thanks for posting this one. I used to live in the town where the movie begins. Big Spring Texas. It’s the place where god would start if the world needed an enema.
March 16, 2012 at 8:06 pm
You are most welcome, Bob. I got quite a laugh out of your description of Spring Texas!
March 19, 2012 at 5:05 pm
Kat, it is Big Spring, TX. It is not plural and they evince some belief that something about it is “Big”. I find the first part to be true and the second not so much. 😉
There are places whose place names are seldom pronounced correctly. In Texas, this place is one. Another is in south central Texas and is truly named New Braunfels. Countless Texans pronounce this either “New Brawnsfel” or “New Brawnsfels”. I do not know why.
Both towns’ names came up recently in a facebook discussion that usually centers on my own home town of San Angelo, TX.
March 19, 2012 at 5:43 pm
Rick,
Considering Bob lived there it seems strange he’d forget the S on Springs.
I laugh when people try and pronounce Worcester, MA. It comes out like WAR-CHES-TAH. It is really pronounced WIS-TAH.
March 19, 2012 at 6:50 pm
You missed my point, Kat. YOU dropped the word “Big” in the city name above, when you answered him. Thus, my post.
Yes, I didn’t find out until a couple of decades ago that the sauce shared pronunciation weirdness with the city in your state. 😉 But, of course they had their progenitor to thank for that.
March 19, 2012 at 7:18 pm
Rick,
I did miss your point! I guess to a Texan the Big is important.
Yes, ’tis true: the sauce and the city both have strange pronunciations not based at all on their spelling.
March 21, 2012 at 2:48 pm
Kat, there’s a long (and to me very interesting) discourse on the place name pronunciation here:
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1319395
March 21, 2012 at 3:01 pm
Rick,
I found that whole discussion intriguing. One contributor said wait and listen to a local. I’m guessing that’s the best advice!
March 21, 2012 at 3:26 pm
Yep. TX has many Spanish place names slaughtered by those who followed on. Spanish constructs a sound for “ll” that is the wrapping of “l” and “y” in your mouth at almost the same time, where you start out with the first and wind up with the last. A couple of these are Amarillo (means “yellow” in Spanish, but is pronounced with a simple “l” sound in TX) and Llano (means “plain” in Spanish, but also has just a simple “l” sound in TX). Near Austin, we have the little place called Manchaca, but Austinites pronounce that like Man-shack, totally ignoring the Spanish format of Man-cha’-ca (where the all “a” sounds are short).
The part of the comments in that link that tickled me most was the tossed-off comment:
“There is no such thing as sloppy speech. All that happens is that writing fails to keep up with the spoken language.”
March 21, 2012 at 4:33 pm
Rick,
I had a few years of Spanish so I would tend to pronounce the names as if they were in Spain which I did as I read your comment then I saw the pronounciation in Texas.
My friend always wanted paeLLa. I tried to explain how the double ll was pronounced but he would have none of it. It doesn’t look like that was his defense!
March 22, 2012 at 12:40 am
Yep, there’s another little town NW of Austin whose name is Burnet. They got so tired of people pronouncing it bur-net’ that they put up a really big billboard in the middle of the only highway through town that said, “It’s Burnet, durn it!” That’s all the full-sized billboard had on it. 😉