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Hello, hello, hello, everyone. Malcolm Gladwell here, I hope you're healthy and safe in these strange times, I come offering distraction.

And Lord knows we all need a little bit of that right now. So I'm holed up in a countryside outside of New York City where my big news is that I just saw a bald eagle yesterday, which I'm taking is some kind of sign from God. And I'm working away on season five of revisionist history. And the thought occurred to me because I'm going so stir crazy right now that lots of thoughts are occurring to me that by the end of the season, we're going to have a total of 50 episodes of revisionist history on the books, 50.

Doesn't that call for some kind of special occasion? You know, back in twenty sixteen, I started this show as a lark. My friend Jacob Weisberg said, just do one season, you can do it in your spare time, which turned out to be a lie. But then so many people tuned in and egg me on that. I said, OK, do a second season and then I did a third and well here we are on the verge of season five.

And now Jacob and I have even started a company, Pushkin Industries, to spread the podcast Love even more broadly. OK, so here's my big idea.

So many of you seem to love writing in with comments and questions that I think we should take a poll. Let's pick the greatest revisionist history episode ever.

We're going to post a dozen candidates and you can vote for your favorite, just go to Pushkin's FM and follow the link at the top of the page. And just to kick things off, I'm going to tell you which one I'm voting for and play it for you. Then in the coming weeks after we've counted your votes will replay your winning episodes to along with some new behind the scenes material and commentary about these stories for me. All right. My favorite drumroll, please.

Analysis Para Praksis Elvis, the final episode of Season three, now, why do I like this one so much? Because the whole episode was totally random. I was reading a book by Janet Perry called Behind the Shock Machine about the famous psychologist Stanley Milgram, a really good book, by the way. And she interviews one of MG's former research assistants, a guy named Alan Elm's. Gina Perry mentions, I think, in a footnote at Elmsford, once written a paper on Elvis Presley.

He called it 12 Ways to say lonesome. And it's all about error and control in the music of Elvis Presley, about the fact that Elvis could never remember the words to a critical part of his big hit, Are You Lonesome Tonight? And I thought, oh, it's kind of interesting. So I read the essay and I went to YouTube. And sure enough, every time Elvis sings that song live, he just mangles the bridge in the middle, which is the emotional heart of the song.

But as interesting as this was, it didn't seem like something you could make an entire episode out of. I mean, Elvis forgets lyrics, big deal. So I kind of forgot about it until I was on the phone with my friend Dave Wirch after who lives in Los Angeles and is the most magically connected guy of all time. Like if you gave me an impossible task, can you get Taylor Swift to sing at my niece's birthday party or can you get Warren Buffett to look over my 401k?

I would just call Dave and he would somehow make it happen. So I asked Dave, who knows a lot about Elvis, who could walk me through that song and explain why it's so hard. And Dave says, without missing a beat. Well, Jack White could do that. Next thing you know, I'm on a train to Nashville. Mind you, I still don't think there's an episode in there, but I figured, Jack White, how many chances will I get to meet Jack White and then, well, I'm not going to give away what happened when I got there.

My point is, everything about reporting that episode was a surprise. I had no idea none. But after I met all the folks you're about to hear, I thought, holy mackerel, I can't believe what just happened. Not only do I have a show, I think I have a really great show. And the shows the come to get it by magic are always sweeter than the shows that come together by sweat and tears. Anyway, that's why it's my favorite.

Have a listen. The New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute is in a very formal European style building on a quiet side street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, oak tables, high ceilings in the library, long ribbons of leather bound volumes and five different busts of Sigmund Freud all in a row. I went there to meet with the society's president, Michelle Press, a psychoanalyst herself, with that lovely quality of patience and openness the best therapists always have.

I wanted to talk with her about a subject that I've always found deeply interesting about Freud called Parap Praksis.

But not just anyone's per praksis, the Kings pair Praksis. And. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

After the first two episodes on Memory earlier this season, I decided to do a third. It involves an odyssey. This odyssey took me from the pages of the Handbook of Psycho biography to a shrine in Tennessee, to the legendary battery studios in Times Square and to the hushed offices of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, where I sat with Michelle Press in search of an answer to a simple question. What if a singer couldn't remember the words to a song, a song hit song a thousand times particular parts of the song, the same part of the song over and over?

What would that tell us about the singer?

It was a term in German faulty acts or faulty functions. It would be slips of the tongue. It could be misreadings, miss hearings, but it's for its invention. Michelle Press is talking about Parap Praksis from the Greek parent, meaning abnormal beyond Praksis, meaning act, abnormal speech acts or as they are more colloquially known, Freudian slips. Does Freud mean that there are no accidental slips or that if you look at the range of accidental steps, you can find meaning in some?

So when you read him, he doesn't want to sound that kind of definitive. He'll say yes, may be one might prove that there are some that are truly accidental or truly a result of fatigue or of maybe some, you know, medical illness. But he said if you do the work, one will find the reasons for the slip that they're not accidental, that they have. He called it a sense and that that sense has to do with unconscious forces or unconscious ideas that are trying to find expression, but are because they're unacceptable.

They emerge in these ways when one might be unguarded.

Now, is that concept of unacceptability central to the notion of Praksis?

Yes. When I was a lad. Over here. In 1956, early in his career, Elvis Presley recorded a song called Old Shep. It's a sentimental song about a boy and his dog, Shep, written in the 1930s by Red Foley. The dog gets old and sick. The vet says there's no hope. The boy aims his rifle at Shep to put him out of his misery, but he can't pull the trigger.

He lies down next to Shep, cradles him in his arms as the dog dies and the song ends.

Oh, Shelby has gone. Well, if you don't get his go. I know more with the. But if dogs have. That's on the. All share piles, one for. Who all share is not one of Elvis's more famous songs, but in an essay published in 2005 on Elvis, the psychologists Alan Elm's and Bruce Heller have an aside about a small but significant discrepancy between the original version of old Shep and Elvis cover. I'm going to come back to Hellgren Elm's in a while because they really do the most thorough analysis of Elvis's lyrical parrot, Praksis.

But let's start with old Shep. Listen to Hank Snow performing the lyrics as they were originally written, the boy has just put away his gun, realizing he can't shoot Shep.

So I threw down that little gun. Ran right up to his. He let his faithful hold his right online. Now, listen to Elvis sing his version. I had struck the best friend. I cried. So I scarcely. Hank Snow sings, I stroked the best pal a man ever found, meaning that the boy considers an act of violence against his best pal, then decides against it and takes instead the path of nurture and sympathy. He recovers his humanity.

But Elvis things I had struck the best friend a man ever had, which turns the meaning of the song completely upside down, the boy does not recover his humanity. He now holds himself responsible for an act of violence against Shep, an act of violence that in fact he did not commit. Stroke becomes struck and all of a sudden a song about moral redemption turns into a song about morbid remorse. Now, I suppose you can say stroke struck, whatever, those two words sound the same.

It's just a cover, but it's not just a cover. Elvis was obsessed with old Shep. It's the first song he ever learned on the guitar. He played it incessantly as a child at age 10. He played it at the Mississippi Alabama Fair, his first public performance. He played it at his high school talent show. And one, he played it on dates with girls. He played it well into his career.

And why does the song resonate so much with him? It's a song about love, betrayal and loss themes that are at the center of Elvis's life. He's a twin lost twin, someone whose twin died in utero, and he's obsessed by that fact, he brings it up again and again the loss of someone who should have been his closest friend. Elvis's mother, Gladys, is, to say the least, unusual, she's controlling intense, he calls her baby.

Gladys died when Elvis was just 23. When he first saw her casket, he threw himself on top of her body, then stepped back and talked about how beautiful she was while pointing to her dead feet. He called them her little suitcase. He did this again and again. At the end of the funeral service, he lay on top of her casket saying, I want to go with you, I don't want to stay here. I can't be without you.

And we haven't even gotten to Priscilla, Elvis's wife, he spotted her when she was 14 and eventually convinced her to move in with him in Memphis. Once Elvis took you to a movie, this is Priscilla being interviewed by Barbara Walters in 1985.

Why? Why that fascination? I don't know. I don't know what the fascination with this is not the first time that he had done this. I don't know if it was for the shock value, you know, to see how people would react or just for his own thrill that you wrote. There were times when you and Elvis spent days in the bedroom, freezing bedroom. He liked to drink on the windows with blackout drapes or no sunlight ended day after day.

It went into weeks. Yes, we stayed like that. We had our food delivered by the door and. It was cold, I mean, he did like a cold and it was dark and I could get really only. And that's that's how he. Like it at times, like a cocoon, almost like a womb, I guess you think?

Priscilla and Barbara Walters are on a white couch surrounded by pink flowers, Priscilla is in a strapless sundress. She looks amazing. Barbara Walters turns to her and says, Elvis controlled your looks, your clothes, your hair, your makeup. He controls you totally. Priscilla says, yes, he did.

Then six years you lived there before he decided to marry you. In those six years of sleeping with him every night, he never had intercourse with you. You wrote in your book that there were times when you begged began six years and. So why? Well, again, you know, I can only go back to what his concept was, what he wanted in a woman and somewhere he along in his past, he said that he wanted a virgin.

Elvis is complicated. And what does Freud's theory of praxis say?

That complicated feelings, inappropriate, maybe unacceptable feelings are normally suppressed. But every now and again, some little bit of that buried emotion slips out.

And if you're paying attention and listening closely, that little slip can tell you something struck for stroke. But old Shep is just the beginning for Elvis, the real power of Praksis occurs in Are You Lonesome Tonight, a song originally written in the 1920s and which Elvis took to the top of the charts just after he came out of the army.

Are you also do you know what it is 016 take to? Elvis at the RCA Studios on Music Row in Nashville, April 4th, 1960, the recordings from the original session now held in the Sony Music Archive.

Yeah, this is there's numerous takes here. So they fall apart. They make a mistake and what have you.

John Jackson and Vic Enniscorthy from Sony, me all listening together at the legendary Battery Studios in Manhattan, where everyone from John Lennon to Bruce Springsteen recorded Holy Ground.

I started my quest at the very beginning.

Is your heart still Charolais? Oh, tell me a little something to. But I see so many is here when he records that are the ordinary singing along with him or their language. I don't know, life goes on. You know, he always preferred to have everyone in one room. Yeah. And record live even in one room. Not in booths. No, no, no, no, no. He hated booths.

Recording the song was not Elvis's idea. It was a favorite of the wife of his manager, Tom Parker, in the studio. Elvis asked the light to be turned off.

So the room was in darkness. He did five takes. He didn't like any of them.

It was four in the morning when he recorded it. So he made everyone get out of the studio, go away, and then he just, you know, did it. Yeah. And then they this is the second take which they told them of the background singers, you know, partly because he said, just stop the tape. You know, I'm done. They said, just do it once more because, you know, we get a pop on there.

So the third tape ends up being the master. Oh, I see. And then they held up their label, held it back for seven, eight months because they didn't realize what they had on their hands. Yeah, it was seven months, I think after he yeah. They finally released it as a single and didn't go out. He had done eight songs for Elvis is back. And this was just like, yeah, just try this one.

Recorded in the wee hours of the morning in darkness as a favor to someone else, a song neither Elvis nor his label particularly liked.

It's almost like the song had a curse on it right from the beginning. And from then on, Elvis could never quite get it right.

I talked about this with Michelle Prest at the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Elvis wasn't typically someone who forgot the words to the songs. He sang this all these examples of his life of him being able to recite, to sing from memory, massive amounts of stuff. Um, and I'm interested about that. There's little slip I'm worried about. He said I said I'm worried about that. I'm interested in that. And I'm wondering what the what would you make of that as a psychoanalyst?

I try to go on, but of course, I'm talking to a hardcore Freudian. I meant to say I was interested, but what came out was worried. I mean, I'm still caught on your slip, obviously, thinking, what do you what do you make of it?

So one thought was whether the slip might be a key to something that you're figuring out and puzzling with with him, because you're right now you're immersed in him. Oh, I am I've been singing the song under my breath for months, I can't understand why I've never been an Elvis fan. I don't know a single song of his or am I am I drawn to this story?

Because isn't this story that I'm talking to the great anxiety of anyone in a creative field, that moment when you lose control? Right. Where the. The presentation to the audience is unmasked. I want to I want to show you I take up my laptop, pull up YouTube.

There's a mountain of Elvis on YouTube, one of the last performances of his life.

It's bananas. I mean, it's he's singing a song.

He's singing thousands of times, and he just completely loses control of it. I can skip it.

I love him, too. I wonder if you want to relate. You know, someone said the world's a stage and each of us play it like you play in the middle class tax. I'm so sorry. Now I missed you and came back to you. Forgot to urge you to change your tone. When I first saw it as someone who I mean, I'm not Elvis, but I'm someone in a creative field. It terrified me. It's like up on stage doing what he's paid to do.

And he he just got nothing on you and your life going to go on living without you. How the stage is bare and I'm sitting there and without any hair. Come back to me for every live performance he's ever given of this that we have on tape, he mangles the bridge. He can't do it right.

It's his he's returning to his song again and again and again and again and again and doing the same kind of in this particular, always a bridge.

So kind of like the singing part. He's almost over. How many years did this go on? Years. OK, in 1982, the life version was written in the U.K., which number 25 in the British singles chart at Battery Studios.

I made the Sony guys play every version they had.

They even have names laughing Elvis, crazy Elvis, each one stranger than the one before.

The world's a stage in his of us. We've got. There's sweat and tears streaming down his face. Have, of course, the. It goes on like this on and on. It's like a baby. Looking for some. That's it. Do you agree with. There's an old adage, which I'm sure has been quoted, too, so many times, you're sick of price service, quality pick any two can have everything. Actually had an argument with some guy recently who gave me that line.

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There's nothing to lose that's simply safe. Dotcom slash Gladwell. Have you ever played the song before? No, I never played it before. It's funny, I played a bunch of chick lit a bunch of his stuff you might flip on. That is a standby switch on the back.

I'm with Jack White at his studio in Nashville, third man records, Jack White, formerly of the White Stripes, one of the great rock and rollers of his generation, and a huge Elvis fan.

Here's a shrine to Elvis in his hallway, actual shrine. All that's missing is flowers. We met in his private office, lots of black and yellow and leather and taxidermy. He sat on the couch with a guitar.

Do you play do you play Elvis songs in concert? Sometimes I do like a seven three miracle treatment mean.

Oh, man, I want you to love me, let me just say. Jamie Jones is saying. Don't to say don't stop enjoying anything, any other ones you do, by the way, why do you why that one?

What's it about that song?

I had heard that earlier from a band called the Flat Duo Jets that I really liked. And I didn't know it was Elvis. And then when I heard the Elvis version, I connected the two. Oh, now you and I started doing it when I played in coffeehouses. I started playing that way. I was like 16. Yeah. So I was back, which is funny.

I eventually heard a story of a Robert Plant telling Elvis he loved that song when Led Zeppelin met Elvis and then they walked out of the hallway, that Elvis poked his head out in the hallway and sang that song to Robert Plan.

They sang it back to each other.

And look, you're crying and must have been an amazing moment.

Jack White owns the original acetate pressing of Elvis's first recording from 1953. My Happiness After We Talked White took me into his vault to show it. To me, it's priceless. He asked me if I wanted to hold it. I was too terrified to say yes. Jack White seemed like the right person to see to try and understand Elvis's problem. Are you lonesome tonight? All right. Let me see if I can take a crack at. And I have to give a couple of worlds, but.

Are you lonesome tonight? Do you miss me tonight? Are you sorry? We drifted apart. Does your memory stray? To a bright, sunny day when I kissed you and called you sweetheart. Do the chairs in your parlor seem empty and do you give a doorstep and pitch me, they use your heart to with fame. Do you want some some guy? That's the first half of the song, the sung version, all questions a man is wondering whether his lover misses him.

Then comes the Spokane Bridge in which the emotional tables are turned and the man leaves himself bare. Allanson, them tonight has been recorded countless times over the years, a lot of performers leave out the bridge because it's corny in a way too long and hard. Elvis kept it in. So does Jack White.

I wonder if you're lonesome. You know, someone said that the world's a stage and each must play a part in fate, had to playing in love with you as my sweetheart. That one was where we. I loved you at first glance. You're so clever, you never missed a cue. Think back to. You seem to change, you're acting strange. Honey, you lied when you said you love me and I had no cause to doubt you.

But I'd rather go on hearing your lies and go on living without. Now the stage is bare. And I was standing there with emptiness all around. I think it brings a crescendo is your heart filled with. Shall I come back again to tell me, dear, sorry to me. Oh wait.

You you you enjoyed that? I did.

It gets it gets there's some nice parts where it gets the you can see playing that live now that just did that like what we just did that I played it once yesterday I reading this but now playing like that I could see why alive you could really, that really could get to be a really emotional song.

So I didn't really think about it till just then.

What led you to think that just now?

Because it feels like, well, it's in a mine, it's a lot of minor chords. So that that that's already gets you in that melancholy vibe. But it has it has that.

What just occurred to me now is he doesn't he doesn't really care that if she's lonesome, he's Lonesome Dove, the singer is lonesome and it's a it's a MacGuffin to pretend like I'm worried about you.

Are you lonesome tonight? You know, but it's really he's the singer is worried about himself.

So that could be you know, you take that kind of emotional song and you put years and years on stage and then you put drugs in the mix and then in your own state of mind, at times it could be you could be on to something there.

It could be a real diversion that it's too powerful to sing.

What's fascinating is that the some parts the singer is in control and he's worried about her right spoken parts. The singer is vulnerable. He's confessing his own. And it's so screwed up. It's like, I know you lied to me and I wish you hadn't. Right. I wish I didn't know that you lied to me because I'd rather be in the state of being deceived than know the truth. Which is that right?

17 convolutions of neuroticism. Right.

Is he still is still blaming her. Most of the lines still still pointing the finger.

White says you can't run from that kind of emotion, not if you're singing the song properly. And so when he writes songs, he tries to establish some distance between himself and the feelings he's singing about.

I tried to push it into a character's standpoint rather than it being a self confession confessional for me, because I think that would be really hard to consistently keep living that moment over and over and over again.

I've definitely seen older artists ignoring certain parts of their certain songs in their career because it's probably too close to home about something or other.

But you can't avoid a song's emotional effects all the time, and especially not when you have to read a soliloquy in the middle of it, which is what the Are You Lonesome Bridge is a speech parachuted into the heart of the song.

I had a little flub moment at one point trying to figure out, well, wait a minute, it's a waltz. You know, you have that. So like.

I wonder if. Three, so one, two, three, one, two. Freeze here, your brain kind of wants to go. I wonder if you're lonesome tonight. That's what your brain wants to do. You know, someone said that the world's a stage and we must play a part. Then it starts to get that.

Oh, I see. It breaks down. Yeah.

I mean I mean, I would I can definitely say that this would be a lot easier if someone else was playing guitar and I could just recite that part.

Which should I recite it while you play the guitar. Yeah, let's do that. Right. I'm not going to torture you with my rendition of the Spokane Bridge. Well, maybe later. I'm just saying, until I die, I can say I play with Jack White.

And then because how many opportunities am I going to get like this, I asked Jack White to help me edit the soliloquy if one were to rewrite it. I'm thinking you that you are you lose the first three lines. Hmm. Fate had me playing in love.

You as my sweetheart or even act one was when we met. Why not? Why don't they just start with act?

Why do they act? One was where I loved you at first glance. You read your lines so carefully, never missed a cue. What I do there, you say carefully, carefully, which is a clever, beautiful prosecutor, then came back to. You seem to change, you're acting strange. What did Jack White do there? The actual lyric is you read your lines so cleverly, he said you read your lines so carefully.

Carefully for Cleverley, a man singing one of the songs of his musical idol comes to the emotionally complex center. And what do we hear? A moment of vulnerability.

Can he be as clever as Elvis? He's not sure. He must be careful.

Perre Praksis. Sometimes, you know, I love I love him so much and that, you know, I'm afraid to learn more about certain things like, you know, when it's you so close to it and you've experienced certain things about, you know, nothing in comparison to what he went through.

But you're in the state where we do the same kind of thing. We perform and we go on stages and we make records and all this stuff from a different time period. But you notice these tiny little moments that are when you when you see someone. Oh, I know exactly what that's about.

I know exactly what that feels like. There are ten known live recordings of Elvis performing Are You Lonesome Tonight? Starting in 1961, in a concert, a block arena in Honolulu up to the end of Elvis life in 1977, Alan Elms and Bruce Heller analyzed them all in their essay 12 Ways to Say Lonesome Assessing Air and Control in the Music of Elvis Presley. Elms and Heller find that Elvis performs the song portion of Are You Lonesome Tonight? More or less flawlessly, because the sung portion is the part of the song where the singer is in control.

But in the Spokane Bridge, the narrator is suddenly the one who's been deceived and rejected, and that's the part Elvis can't get right. Elm's and Heller count a total of 109 errors in those 10 live performances of the Spokane Bridge, 29 of which involve just four lines. I loved you at first glance where he confesses the depths of his feelings, you seem to change. You acted strange, where he testifies to his betrayal and rejection and why I've never known where he expresses his feelings of anger and victimization and with emptiness all around where he admits to his loneliness.

The most problematic renditions of the bridge are the later ones which come after the summer of 1972. What happens in the summer of 1972 and one day you went in and said, I'm leaving. There was another man in your life. He was your karate teacher right next to him, and you went off then and lived with him? Yeah.

Priscilla Presley back on the couch with Barbara Walters, America's prime time Freudian.

It was said that Elvis tried to kill him. I wanted him killed. Right. Do you believe that? I think at that time, yes, he did. He wanted that to happen. I do the cheers and your father singing Empty and. Do you get. Is that you, a ball head and wish you had hair? Through the pain, shall I come back? Tell me, do are you. Oh, Lord. I want a man who fears betrayal and abandonment is betrayed and abandoned.

And I had no cost, Dr.. It's too much he's a wreck, so your baby. Shall I come look at. Tell me, dear. Also. I have a confession to make. I'm obsessed with running. Most days I finish work and go for a run in the evening where I do hills in my backyard or head out to the track. I think of my running time is my moment of reflection and restoration. And over the past two years, I've been running a gear made by tracks with a New England based brand that makes some of the most functional and beautiful products on the market.

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Learn more, attract Smith dotcom slash revisionist history and use code Gladwell a checkout for fifteen dollars off your first order of 75 dollars or more. After I left Jack White, I went to see Bobby Braddock just down the street at the Sony Studios on Nashville's Music Row.

This was just a guess. You may remember Bobby Braddock from season two of revisionist history. He's the legendary songwriter I called the King of Tears.

Braddock wanted to introduce me to a good friend of his, a singer songwriter named Casey Bowles.

That's the Church of Christ out of 30 something long red hair, the kind of person who, if you touch, you expect a little jolt of static work.

Oh, you want something that's long overdue. Amazing that we were in the biggest of the Sony recording studios on the main floor in a corner where the piano was. Casey saying, Are you lonesome tonight with Bobby on the piano? Are you sorry we drifted? Then we sat and they talked about Nashville, they talked about how they both grew up in the Church of Christ, the most strict of Southern fundamentalist denominations, and they talked about Elvis.

My dad thought he was Elvis, I think. Yeah, he really he was a church of Christian leader and really wanted to be a Dornier badly. And so Ray Walker was one of the Jordan ears and he tried to emulate him by way of dress and hairstyle.

And so I grew up either hearing him say, hello, darling, nice to see, or doing this sort of, you know, is it vaudeville style or just just sort of a over-the-top maudlin style, I guess is maudlin, the way you'd say Marlon.

Then Bobby Braddock started talking about recitations, the spoken part in many older country songs, and he made the same point that Jack White did, that they're much easier if they're set to music. If you could just as easily sing them like on one of the most famous songs, he stopped loving her today. The stage like.

Yeah, you could, saying that she came to see him one last time. If she would, and that works either way, but this is just like we got this song, let's get a recitation, throw it in there and and the obvious made it work.

And I'm thinking just instinctively, just because he was, uh, he was just so good. Recitations are unusual these days.

Braddock hasn't written one since, something he did for Toby Keith in the 1990s.

Less successful recitation song on him was actually it was actually was it was it was a hip hop thing. I want to talk about me. But that was talking talking to Toby Keith. That's what I'm thinking about.

Yeah, but, you know, it's we can you can you play a little slice of that. Do you remember. I could potentially me Keith. I never do. I never do that.

Why do that. Always. I always do it with the karaoke thing where I get up there and play the thing.

I want to talk about me when we talk, but I won't talk about no one or that you talk about your work, how your boss is a jerk.

You talk about church in your head when you first talk about the trouble you've been having with your mother and your dad, with your brother and your dad and your mother and your crazy ex lover, you know, and then it's that and then the menstrual menstrual period line, which everybody said, you can't put that in.

So nobody else ever got it, you know, and it was one of the biggest songs they write about your medical charts.

And when you start. Yeah, I take that out. Nobody recurrent. Toby Keith, it is probably the only one who would have known.

Then I showed them the prize. I brought it in my bag, my copy of the Handbook of Psychogeography containing the HeLa and Elm's essay. Oh, no, I have my book here.

I'll tell you this version.

It is fascinating to a pair of Elvis fanatics. It was like I'd unearth the Dead Sea Scrolls. What's the book? The book called Handbook of Psycho Biography. And it has an essay on this song. Wow, Psycho biography. And so.

Yeah. So here's so this guy is gone through.

He's made a chart.

Well, almost all of the lyrical mistakes that Elvis made and every known live recording. Oh gosh.

Yeah. These were two songwriters and I felt they immediately saw themselves in that chart. Do you find yourself making the kind of errors, sometimes even subtle ones that, you know, we've been talking about that's so interesting.

I wrote a song about my mother called Somebody Something, and my mother is adorable.

And whenever you heard about things going wrong or like some sort of a story, it was my dad. And so I finally was like, you know what? Why are we the only person in the family that there's nothing I haven't written about? So I was trying to dig dirt on her and there was nothing.

And so I ended up writing the song about her called Somebody Something. And I cry every time I do it. And there is a line, it says, you know, she's always been somebody something and she's lived every life but her own, um. And it's gone. I can't remember it right now. I know that thing I remember. Hmm.

She's always been so many symptoms and everything, but a daughter, a mother, a daughter, a lover, a wife and a mother. She's lived every life. But, yes, she's always been somebody something. And there's a line that says, you know, she she wonders what it might be like to be somebody else. And she wonders.

When it feels like to be free. But she's always imagined being nobody, nothing, and that's something she never want to be. But that line usually is just gone and a lot of times I'll go hold on and divert and tell a funny story really quickly.

Um, yeah, we what's the specific line that's gone is which one? Uh, well, it's gone again.

Um, she's always been somebody sort of been everything but my daughter through a daughter, a lover, a wife and a mother.

She's been everything. But alone, yeah. Yeah, why is it that long? I don't know, I think that. I don't know, I think when you would she's so when you see somebody give so much of themselves and that's truly the only thing that she will ever experience. And I think it's what I've experienced the most of. A minute before we were joking about Toby Keith, now Casey is pensive as she compares her mother's life to her own.

Not being able to make a relationship work the first 18, 20 times out of the gate or, you know, officially the first two and not being a mother and there's no real closure, right? Yeah, love her.

Go to church. Go to church. Where do I sit still?

Because she makes me stay awake. It's good.

When I when I was a kid, I'd get bored in church. My mother reach down and pinch me.

Oh, I got smacked. We Casey, can you play that song for us?

Is it going to be to say, oh, ok, ok. Well we'll see if this happens. She grew up playing cowgirl. Dream she'd see. Oh, shoot. Hold on, there's a little bit Elvis in this that's just random pulled on Draymond. Did she tell you what I'm going to do again? But did I just say, sorry, I'm thinking about Mom. She grew up playing cowgirl. She grew up playing cowgirl. Dream she'd see how Hollywood Sun.

She knew some distant Friday night with a cigarette just right. They were coming, Gary. As far as she could say from there, those were just. That's all right. Hold on a second. My first reaction to Casey's failure of memory was to be embarrassed for her, worried that she had lost control. That's the way we're trained to think.

Just listen to the words I've just used failure, embarrassed, worried in one way or another. That's what this season of revisionist history has been about, about the ways we judge each other for our mistakes and choices. The easiest thing in the world is to look at those mistakes and condemn. The much harder thing is to look at those mistakes and understand she married in December, maybe more.

She looked all grown up standing there like that. Had a honeymoon in Memphis town. As far as she could say from there, those were just the facts. When somebody started. She's part of Praksis is not a failure when the performer slips. The audience is not cheated. It's the opposite. Para Praksis is a gift I presented myself as interested in this story, but now you know that this subject doesn't just interest me, it worries me. Losing control is my great anxiety.

When Jack White said carefully instead of cleverly, it was a hint that playing Elvis wasn't a trivial matter for him. It was a sacred act carefully full of care. And Elvis, after the loss of Priscilla, sang a song he sang a thousand times only now in a way that gave the audience a window on his pain.

Mistakes reveal our vulnerabilities. They are the way the world understands us, the way performers make their performances real. So Bobby Braddock and I sat there listening to Casey sing Tears in her eyes, fumbling to remember the lyrics of a song about her mother fumbling not because her mother didn't matter to her, but because she did.

She's always there. Someone is. She'd say, that's just called me and all my. She's always there. Is beautiful. Why are you covering your mouth? I'm just it's just weird. Because I've never it's just weird when you're thinking about what it is like, I just thought, oh, bad memory, too many songs, old German songs in there, but at any point in time, I could pull out.

A rap from New Edition from 1980 to like, why is that in there? And something that you wrote is not in there that is so weird. It's not weird, a lesser person would have sung it perfectly. Thank you for listening to season three of revisionist history. Senior producer is MIA with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista are editor is Julia Barton Flon. Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson, original music by Louis Scarer. Special thanks to Kim Greene and Hal Humphris of Storyboard MPLX in Nashville and here in New York, thanks to Jason Gambril, Evan Viola, Rachel Strahm, Nicole Bonsais, Kristen Mainzer, Carly Migliore, Andy Bowers and of course, as always, Lafe.

Jacob Weisberg. Eye Mountain Babo. OK. So it will be I wonder if you lonesome tonight. You know, someone said that the world's a stage. Must play a part. They had me playing and love you as my sweetheart Aqualung was when we met. I loved you at first glance. You read your lines so cleverly, never missed a cue. Then came back to. You seem to change and you acted strange and why, I'll never know.

How do you lied when you said you love me and I had no cause to doubt you, but I'd rather go on hearing your lies. They go on living without you. Now the stage is bare and I'm standing there with emptiness all around. And if you won't come back to me. They make them bring the curtain. You. Good luck with that. I'm not very musical. Oh, that's very good. That's good.

Thanks for listening to this special kickoff for what we're calling Revisionist Revisited. If you're still here, remember, you can vote for your favorite episode. Visit Kweskin FM and Volke between now and April 20th. And stay tuned for the next revisionist revisited episode on May 14th. Until then, be safe and well. I'm Malcolm Klapper.