Take a Load Off, Annie
A celebration of mishearings
Around this time last year, my life changed. I realized that it isn’t “Up on the housetop, reindeer paws”, and I confess that I realized this because I snobbishly thought, “How could someone write a song about reindeer without knowing that they have hooves, not paws?” Then I figured out that the reindeer pause on the rooftop. I lived my life differently after that.
The name for this type of mishearing is a ‘mondegreen’. There are many, many lovely examples. Apparently, when Taylor Swift sings “got a long list of ex-lovers” in ‘Blank Space’, many people hear "all the lonely Starbucks lovers.” (I mentioned this to someone close to me, who said, “I thought it was about Starbucks!”)
‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ has two mondegreens in the same line: instead of “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light’, people hear “José, can you see, by the donzerly light’. Urban Dictionary’s entry for ‘donzerly’ reads “Used to describe especially patriotic lighting.”
But my favourite mondegreen turns out not to be a mondegreen after all. The Band is a great band, a great Canadian band, and ‘The Weight’ is, if not their best song, their most famous. It has all the elements that make them great, including its beautiful harmonies and enough interesting characters to fill a novel. Even country music, which tends to tell the best stories, no longer does the epic narratives the character in ‘The Weight’ goes through. He just wants to rest and pass along the regards of a woman he knows, but he ends up, among other things, adopting a dog and meeting the Devil.
The problem is the song is confusing from the first chorus, which goes “Take a load off…[something]”. Some people hear ‘Annie’; others hear ‘Fanny’. For years, I was in camp ‘Annie’. My main argument was that it only sounds like ‘Fanny’ only because of the ‘off’ before it, which produces the understandable mondegreen ‘Fanny’. My second argument was that we meet a woman named Annie Lee or Anna Lee in the third verse:
“Well, Luke, my friend
What about young Anna Lee?”
He said, “Do me a favor, son
Won’t ya stay and keep Anna Lee company?”
(This song also has good dialogue.) Pretty obviously, this woman is the same woman mentioned in the chorus. The only evidence against my view was the fifth verse, which is my favourite because it’s sung together and we learn why the character started on the trip in the first place; I love the idea that someone would say, “hey, if you’re heading that way, can you stop by Nazareth and give my regards to everyone?” This verse clearly mentions someone named ‘Fanny’:
Catch a cannonball, now
To take me down the line
My bag is sinkin’ low
And I do believe it’s time
To get back to Miss Fanny
You know she’s the only one
Who sent me here with her
Regards for everyone
Unlike “load off, Annie/Fanny”, there’s no similar problem with “get back to Miss Fanny”. The ‘f’ is unmistakable. I passed this off as an inconsistency in the song which, like most inconsistencies in music, I blamed on all the drugs they were taking. They just didn’t realize they were singing about the same person! They fell for their own mondegreen!
No, come on. This is The Band. Robbie Robertson wouldn’t have let that slide. It turns out that it is Fanny, not Annie (who is actually Anna). Robertson cleared this up a few years ago. He used to run diamonds from Toronto to New York City for his Jewish mobster uncle—rock and roll, am I right?—and, while in New York, he’d visit a bookstore run by one Frances “Fanny” Steloff, who became the basis for the song’s character.
According to Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer and main singer, the song’s Anna Lee is inspired by Anna Lee Amsden, his childhood friend. She wrote a cookbook. Whether this Anna Lee is the song’s Anna Lee is disputed, since Robertson claims to have written the whole thing, and Ms. Amsden doesn’t seem to have been around the group during the time the song was written, but Helm said the rest of the band contributed.
The undisputed part is that there are two people in the song: Fanny and Anna Lee. I thought there was one person, Annie, but she doesn’t exist, so what I thought was a mondegreen was actually the correct hearing of the song. Had I been The Band’s producer, I might have encouraged them to choose different character names, but you don’t mess with the Canadian Song Book.