Heard in Missouri: "but good!"

[Charles Doyle]

I have always thought the line said "freest state in the land of the free"!  My misheard version is poetically more satisfying (and equally fictional).

--Charlie
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:07:35 -0500
>From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>

>I'm afraid it's the latter--we're talking Walt Disney, after all. It's far easier to suspend disbelief in precisely this way, especially when the whole point is tellin' tall tales about Davy C. and his exploits, than to interpret the antecedent of "*he*" in
>
>Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee,
>Greenest state in the land of the free,
>Raised in the woods so's he knew ev'ry tree,
>Kilt him a bar when *he* was only three.
>Davy, Davy Crockett,
>King of the wild frontier.
>
>Besides which, if Davy's b'ar were being specified as "only three", that would imply this wasn't such an all-fired great deed as killin' a grown-up b'ar would have been.
>
>LH

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