Pushkin. The New York Psychoanalytics 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, what Freud called parapraxis, but not just anyone's parapraxis, the King para praxis. 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 Psychobiography 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 sung 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, mishearings, but it's Freud's invention. Michelle Press is talking about parappraxis, from the Greek parameaning abnormal, beyond praxis 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 slips 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, maybe one might prove that there are some that are truly accidental, or truly a result of fatigue or of maybe some medical illness. But he said, if you do the work, one will find the reasons for this 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 parapraxis? Yes, one over medal sod strange. In nineteen fifty six, early in his career, Elvis Presley recorded a song called Old Sheep. It's a sentimental song about a boy and his dog, Shep, written in the nineteen thirties 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. Who Sheppy has gone? Whether good dog is gone? And no war? But if dogs have a heaven, that's one, Oh sheppers wonderful. Old Shep is not one of Elvis's more famous songs, but in an essay public in two thousand and five on Elvis, the psychologists Alan Elms and Bruce Heller have an a side about a small but significant discrepancy between the original version of Old Shep and Elvis's cover. I'm going to come back to Heller and Elms in a while because they really do the most thorough analysis of Elvis's lyrical para praxis. 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 old gun, ran right up to his side, the lady's faithful old head right online and friends, I stroked the best power but a man ever found. I even cried, so I see now listen to Elvis sing his version, I had strung the best friend a man, I cry. Hanks Now 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 sings, 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 shape, 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. Alvis was obsessed with Old Shepp. It's the first song he ever learned on the guitar. He played it incessantly as a child. At age ten, he played it at the Mississippi Alabama Fair, his first public performance. He played it at his high school talent show and won. 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 twinless twin, someone who's 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. Alvis's mother, Gladys is, to say the least unusual. She's controlling, intense. He calls her baby. Gladys died when Alvis was just twenty three. 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 suities. 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, Alvis's wife. He spotted her when she was fourteen and eventually convinced her to move in with him in Memphis. Once Alvis took her to a move Yes he did. This is Priscilla being interviewed by Barbara Walters in nineteen eighty five. Why why that fascination? I don't know. I don't know what the fascination was. 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 of it. You wrote there were times when you and Elvis spent days in the bedroom, freezing bedroom. He liked it find cold, the windows with blackout drapes, so no sunlight entered. Day after day. It went into weeks. Yes, we've 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 it could get real lonely. And that's that's how he liked it at times, like a cocoon, almost like a wound. I guess you think. Priscilla and Barbara Walters are on a white couch surrounded by pink flowers. Priscilla is in a strapless sun dress. She looks amazing. Barbara Walters turns to her and says, Alvis controlled your looks, your clothes, your hair, your make up. He controlled 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 him six years I saw why. Well again, you know, I can only go back to what his concept was as what he wanted in a woman, and somewhere he along in his past he said that he wanted a virgin. Alvis is complicated, and what does Freud's theory of parapraxis say? That complicated feelings inappropriate may be 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 parapraxis occurs in are You Lonesome to Night? A song originally written in the nineteen twenties and which Elvis took to the top of the charts just after he came out of the Army. Are You Blongs Who Days Are? While? Six? Take two? Elvis at the RCA Studios on Music Row in Nashville, April fourth, nineteen sixty The recordings from the original session now held in the Sony Music Archive. Yeah, this is um. There's numerous takes here, so they fall apart, they make a mistake, or what have you? John Jackson and Vic Nissini 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. It's you sherline, tell me Dan, are you lonesome too? Because boys so many? Yeah? Is he uh? When he records that, are the jordan are singing along with him or they're laying that. He always preferred to have everyone in one room, yeah, and record live or even in one room, not in booths or 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 lights 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 him of the background singers, you know, pee pop, because he said, just stop the tape, you know, I'm on They said just do it once more because you know, we get a peepop on there. So the third take ends up being the master. Oh, I see when he held the label held it back for seven eight months, it was he didn't realize what they hit on their hands. Yeah, it was seven months. I think after he they finally released it as a single and didn't ground that he had done eight songs for Elvis's 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 Press at the New York Psychoanalytics Society. Elvis wasn't typically someone who forgot the words to the songs he sang. This, all these examples stut of his life of him being able to recite to sing from memory massive amounts of stuff. I'm worried about. I'm interested about that. There's a little slip I'm worried about, I 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 him, because you're right now, you're immersed in him. Oh I am. I've been singing this song under my breath for months. I can't understand why I've never been an Elvis fan. I don't own a single song of his, or am I am? I drawn to this story because isn't this story that I'm talking to you 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 what. I take up my laptop, pull up YouTube. There's a mountain of Elbos on YouTube, one of the last performances of his life. It's bananas, I mean, just it's He's singing a song he's singing thousands of times, and he just completely loses control of it. I can skip that here coming from I wonder if two loss of a light. You know someone said the roles will state it's in e mus play a party. I've been here playing him early in A plus tax. You read your lian select clearly now I'm missing it. Came back to if I got the word save to change. When I first saw it it as someone in a 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 I'm like, well, I remember, really Goon during your life. I'm gonna go on living without you. Now the stage is bear and I'm standing there without any hair. I don't know if you will come back to me. With every live performance he's ever given of this that we have on tape, he mangles the bridge, can't do it right. It's he's returning to the song again and again and again and again and again and doing the same. In this particular, it's always a bridge of singing part. He's almost over. How many years did this go on years. Okay. In nineteen eighty two, this life and Version was really in the UK and reached on the twenty five 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 stay apart. God. There's sweat and tears streaming down his face and I had no calls to don It goes on like this, on and on your baby shoe again, Dolly, that's it man? Fourty years. I another Verian. Well, I'm doing sere. Have you ever played a song before? No? I never played it before, And it's funny. I played a bunch of check I played a bunch of his stuff. Do you want to put us 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 his 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? Song's a concert? Sometimes? I do? Love what's up treating me? Oh? Love me, love me? Dream and just sing. I was gonna say, don't stop, I'm enjoying it. Anything any other ones you do? Wait, by the way, why do you why that one? What's it about that song? I had heard that early from a band called the Flat Too. A jet said I really liked and I didn't know it was Elvis. And then when I'd heard the Elvis version, I had connected the two, like, oh no, I really and I started doing it. When I put in coffee houses, I started playing that. I was like sixteen yea that goes back, which is funny. I eventually heard a story of Robert Plant telling Elvis he loved that song, and led Zeppelin met Elvis, and then when they walked out out of the hallway that Elvis poked his head out in the hallway and sang that song to Robert Plant. They sang it back to each other and you're crying and must have been an amazing moment. Jack White owns the original ascetate pressing of Elvis's first recording from nineteen fifty three, My Happiness. After we talked, White took me into his vault to show it to me. It's priceless. He asked me if I weren't 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. And are you lonesome tonight? All right? Let me see if we can take a crack. I might have to give her coup worlds. What are your lonesome tonight? Do you miss me tonight? Are you sorry? We drifted apart? Does your memor re strength? You are brightsong moday? We're not show and called you a sweetheart? Do the chair in your power, seam and dey and bear? Do you gaze as your door step and picture me? Then? Is your heart feel with pain? Shall I come back? Yeah? Tell? Are you lonesome? Tone? That's the first half of the song. The song version all questions a man is wondering whether his lover misses him. Then comes the spoken bridge, in which the emotional tables are turned and the man leaves himself bare. Are you learnesome Tonight? Has been recorded countless times over the years. A lot of performers leave out the bridge because it's corny and way too long and hard. Elvis kept it in, so does Jack White. I wonder if you're lonesome tonight. You know someone said that the wilds of stage and each must play a part. If you'd had me playing in love with you as my sweetom, that one was where we had I loved you at first glance. You read your line so cleverly, You've never missed a Q thing came back too. You seem to change, You're acted strange and why I've never known? Honey. You lied when you said you loved me, and I had no cause to doubt you. But I'd rather go on hearing your lies. I'm gonna go on living without Now the stage is there and I'm standing there with emptiness all around. If you won't come back to me and then you bring the curtain back, is your heart fill play? Shall I come back again? Tell me so too? WHOA wait? You would you enjoyed that I did? It gets I gets there's some nice parts where it gets the you can see up playing that live now. I just did that, like well, we just did that. I played it once yesterday like reading this, but now playing like that, I could see while live you could really that really could get to be in 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. Um. What just occurred to me now is he doesn't he doesn't. He doesn't really care that if she's lonesome, he's lonesome. That's the singer is lonesome. And it's a it's a mcguffin to pretend like I'm 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. Um, 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 the time, it could be a real you could be onto something there. It could be a real diversion that it's too powerful. What's fascinating is the the song parts, the singer is in control and he's worried about her. Right the spoken parts, the singer is vulnerable, he's confessing his own and it's still 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 like seventeen convolutions of neuroticism. Because he's still he's 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 We'll wait a minute, it's a waltz. You know you have that. So if I'm like, I wonder if two three so one two three one two three, 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 each play a part. Then it starts to get that's it breaks down. Yeah, I mean would, I mean I would. I can definitely say that this would be a lot easier someone else was playing guitar and I could just recite, uh that part which I recited while you played a guitar. Yeah, I'm not going to torch you with my rendition of the spoken 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 uh, you lose the first three lines fate had me playing in love you as my sweetheart? Or even act one was when we met? Why why don't they just start with act one? That act one was where you met I loved you at first class. You read your lines so carefully, never missed a Q. When I do there, you say carefully instead of cleautiful, then came back to you seem to change. You acted strange. What did Jack White do there? The actual lyric is you read your lines so cleverly, He said, you read your line so carefully carefully for cleverly, 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 para praxis 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're 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 same where we do the same kind of thing. We perform, and we go on stages and we make records and all this stuff. I'm from a different time period, but you notice these tiny little moments that are when you see certainly went, oh, I know exactly what that's about. I don't know exactly what that feels like. There are ten known live recordings of Elvis performing Are You Lonesome Tonight, starting in nineteen sixty one in a concert at Bloc Arena in Honolulu, up to the end of Elvis's life in nineteen seventy seven. Alan Elms and Bruce Heller analyze them all in their essay Twelve Ways to Say Lonesome, Assessing error and control in the music of Elvis Presley. Elms and Heller find that Elvis performs the sung portion of all 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 spoken bridge, the narrator is suddenly the one who's been deceived and rejected and that's the part Elvis can't get right. Elms and Heller count total of a hundred and nine errors in those ten live performances of The Spoken Bridge, twenty nine of which involved 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 conditions of the Bridge are the later ones, which come after the summer of nineteen seventy two. What happens in the summer of nineteen seventy two? And one day you went in and said I'm leaving. There was another man in your life. He was your karate teacher, right, Mike Stone. And you went off then and lived with him. Priscilla Presley back on the couch with Barbara Walters, America's primetime Freudian. It was said that Elvis tried to kill him or wanted him killed, right? Do you believe that? I think at that time, yes, he did. He wanted that to happen. I du the chasing your father seeing empteed? Do you game that your bullhead? I wish you had her? Fool with pain? Shall I come back to me? Dude? Are you lost? Lord? Lord? I want to A man who fears betrayal an abandonment, is betrayed and abandoned. I had no call to Dog. It's too much. He's a wreck. Your baby shot. Come again, Tobby, Dude, are you lonesome? After I left Jack White, I went to see Bobby Braddock just down the street at the Sony Studios on Nashville's Music Row. 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 across alto thirty something, long red hair, the kind of person who if you touch you expect a little jolt of static work. Young. We were in the biggest of the Sony recording studios, on the main floor, in a corner where the piano was Casey sang are you lonesome? Tonight? With Bobby on the piano toss me are you Sobby? 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 Christ long leader and really wanted to be a Jordinaire badly, And so ray Walker was one of the Jordanaires, and he tried to emulate him by way of dress and hairstyle. And so I grew up either hearing him say hello, darling nastasy or doing this sort of you know, is it vaudeville style or just just sort of a over the top modeling style. I guess is modeling the way you'd say it modeling. 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 Braddock's most famous songs, he stopped loving her to stay recitation, Yeah you could sing that. She came to see him one last time. We all wonder if she and that works either way. But this is just like, uh, we got this song, let's get a recitation. Threw it in there and they office made it work. And I'm thinking, just instinctively, just because he was h he was just so good. Recitations are unusual these days. Braddock hasn't written one since something he did for Toby Keith in the nineteen nineties. Last successful recitation. Your song I ham was actually it was a well, actually it was it was it was a hip hop thing. I want to talk about me. That was talking talking, talking what I'm thinking about, But it was you know what can you you can? You can you pay a little slice of that? You remember I never do that? Why do that always? I always do it with with with a karaoke thing where I get up there and play the thing. I want to talk about me, I want to talk about I want to talk about number one or now. You talk about your work, how your boss is a jerk, You talk about your church in your head and when your urse, talk about the trouble you've been having with your mother and your daddy, with your brother and your daddy and your mother and your crazy Acts lover, you know, and then and then the minstrel menstrual period of line, which everybody said, you can't put that in a song, nobody'll ever cut it, you know, And it was one of the biggest songs. They were about your medical charts and when you start check that out, nobody recording to He's probably the only one who would have though. Then I showed them the prize. I brought it my bag, my copy of the Handbook of Psychobiography containing the Heller and Elms essay. Hold on, I'll have my book here. I'll tell you the specimen is fascinating. To a pair of Elvis fanatics. It was like I'd unearthed the Dead Sea scrolls. What's the book. It's the book called Handbook of Psychobiography, and it has an essay on this song. Wow, psycho biography and so yeah, So here's so this guy has gone through. He've made a chart of all of the lyrical mistakes that Elvis made an every known live recording of. 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 multivate story, it was my dad. And so I finally was like, you know what, why aren't 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 this 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. She's lived every life but her own, and it's gone. I can't remember it right now. I don't know that feeling. I can't remember it. She's always been somebody something's been everything but alone, a daughter, a mother, a lot, a daughter, a lover, hawife, and a mother. She's lived to every life but her own. 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 what it feels like to be free, But she's always imagined being nobody's nothing, And that's something she never want to be. But that line usually is just gone. And um, a lot of times I'll go hold on and divert and tell a funny story really quickly. Um yeah, wait, what's the specific line that's gone? Is which one? Uh? Let's gone again? Um, she's always been somebody something that's been everything but a daughter, a daughter, a lover, a wife, and a mother. She's been everything but alone. Yeah yeah, why is it that longe? I don't know. I think that, Um, I don't know. I think when you've even 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 stuff. 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 eighteen thousand times out of the gate or you know, officially the first two and um, not being a mother and we're still real closer, right, Yeah, I love her. Go to church where they're right? Do I sit still? Because she makes me and I stay awake. It's good when I when I was a kid, if I get bored in church and my mother reached him and pinch me, Oh, I got smacked. We Casey, can you play that song for us? Is it's going to be two let's say, okay, okay, Well we'll see if this happens. She grew up playing cowgirl in Bill Road Town, dreaming. She'd see, Oh, shoot, hold on, there's a little linebout Elvis in this. That's just random. Hold on dreaming. See she Hollywood, I'm gonna go again. What did I just say? Sorry, I'm thinking about mom. She grew up playing cow girl. She grew up playing cowgirl in Bellroad Town, dreamings. She'd see HollyHood Sunday. She knew Sunday distant Friday night with a singer. It just right. They would come and carry away as as far shakes safe from that's all right. Hold one 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. Any work and address her Mamma made, she looked down, grown up standing there like that, had a honeymoon in Memphis Town. Yeah, she looked for out us all around, made loving the gray. How coming back as far as she could see from there, those were just the backslide. You went from somebody's daughter somebody's wife. A parapraxis is not failure. When the performer slips, the audience is not cheated. It's the opposite. Parapraxis 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 Alvis 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 hit sang a thousand times only now in a way that gave the audience a window on his pane. Mistakes reveal our vulnerabilities. They are the way the world understands us, the way performers make their performances real. So Bobby Braddick 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, somebody something. She's been everything, daughter, daughter, mother, wife, fan, mother, She's lit every life. But she'd say, that's just called and a woman. She's always there somebody, So God's beautiful. Why are you covering your mouth? I'm just that'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, too many songs in there. But at any point in time, I could pull out a rap from new edition from nineteen eighty two, 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, And if you like this episode, you'll enjoy my new series launching later this year. It's called Broken Record, and you can subscribe right now on Apple Podcasts. Revisionist History is a Upleat production. The senior producer is Mia LaBelle, with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to Kim Green and Hal Humphreys of Storyboard EMP in Nashville and here in New York. Thanks to Jason Gambrel, Evan Viola, Rachel Strom, Nicole Bunsis, Kate Mescal, Kristin Mindzer, Carly Migliori, Andy Bowers, and of course el Hefe Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladmow Okay, so it will be. I wonder if you're lonesome tonight. You know, someone said that the world's a stage and each must play a part. Fate had been playing in love you as my sweetheart. Act one was when we met. I loved you at first glance. You read your line so cleverly. Never missed a Q then came back two. You seem to change, and you acted strange, and why I'll never know. Honey. You lied when you said you loved me, and I had no cause to doubt you. But I'd rather go on hearing your lives than 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, then make them bring the curtain down. How about doing nice, very good? I must say I'm not very musical. Now it's very good, it's good.

Pushkin. The New York Psychoanalytics 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, what Freud called parapraxis, but not just anyone's parapraxis, the King para praxis. 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 Psychobiography 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 sung 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, mishearings, but it's Freud's invention. Michelle Press is talking about parappraxis, from the Greek parameaning abnormal, beyond praxis 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 slips 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, maybe one might prove that there are some that are truly accidental, or truly a result of fatigue or of maybe some medical illness. But he said, if you do the work, one will find the reasons for this 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 parapraxis? Yes, one over medal sod strange. In nineteen fifty six, early in his career, Elvis Presley recorded a song called Old Sheep. It's a sentimental song about a boy and his dog, Shep, written in the nineteen thirties 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. Who Sheppy has gone? Whether good dog is gone? And no war? But if dogs have a heaven, that's one, Oh sheppers wonderful. Old Shep is not one of Elvis's more famous songs, but in an essay public in two thousand and five on Elvis, the psychologists Alan Elms and Bruce Heller have an a side about a small but significant discrepancy between the original version of Old Shep and Elvis's cover. I'm going to come back to Heller and Elms in a while because they really do the most thorough analysis of Elvis's lyrical para praxis. 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 old gun, ran right up to his side, the lady's faithful old head right online and friends, I stroked the best power but a man ever found. I even cried, so I see now listen to Elvis sing his version, I had strung the best friend a man, I cry. Hanks Now 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 sings, 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 shape, 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. Alvis was obsessed with Old Shepp. It's the first song he ever learned on the guitar. He played it incessantly as a child. At age ten, he played it at the Mississippi Alabama Fair, his first public performance. He played it at his high school talent show and won. 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 twinless twin, someone who's 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. Alvis's mother, Gladys is, to say the least unusual. She's controlling, intense. He calls her baby. Gladys died when Alvis was just twenty three. 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 suities. 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, Alvis's wife. He spotted her when she was fourteen and eventually convinced her to move in with him in Memphis. Once Alvis took her to a move Yes he did. This is Priscilla being interviewed by Barbara Walters in nineteen eighty five. Why why that fascination? I don't know. I don't know what the fascination was. 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 of it. You wrote there were times when you and Elvis spent days in the bedroom, freezing bedroom. He liked it find cold, the windows with blackout drapes, so no sunlight entered. Day after day. It went into weeks. Yes, we've 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 it could get real lonely. And that's that's how he liked it at times, like a cocoon, almost like a wound. I guess you think. Priscilla and Barbara Walters are on a white couch surrounded by pink flowers. Priscilla is in a strapless sun dress. She looks amazing. Barbara Walters turns to her and says, Alvis controlled your looks, your clothes, your hair, your make up. He controlled 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 him six years I saw why. Well again, you know, I can only go back to what his concept was as what he wanted in a woman, and somewhere he along in his past he said that he wanted a virgin. Alvis is complicated, and what does Freud's theory of parapraxis say? That complicated feelings inappropriate may be 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 parapraxis occurs in are You Lonesome to Night? A song originally written in the nineteen twenties and which Elvis took to the top of the charts just after he came out of the Army. Are You Blongs Who Days Are? While? Six? Take two? Elvis at the RCA Studios on Music Row in Nashville, April fourth, nineteen sixty The recordings from the original session now held in the Sony Music Archive. Yeah, this is um. There's numerous takes here, so they fall apart, they make a mistake, or what have you? John Jackson and Vic Nissini 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. It's you sherline, tell me Dan, are you lonesome too? Because boys so many? Yeah? Is he uh? When he records that, are the jordan are singing along with him or they're laying that. He always preferred to have everyone in one room, yeah, and record live or even in one room, not in booths or 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 lights 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 him of the background singers, you know, pee pop, because he said, just stop the tape, you know, I'm on They said just do it once more because you know, we get a peepop on there. So the third take ends up being the master. Oh, I see when he held the label held it back for seven eight months, it was he didn't realize what they hit on their hands. Yeah, it was seven months. I think after he they finally released it as a single and didn't ground that he had done eight songs for Elvis's 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 Press at the New York Psychoanalytics Society. Elvis wasn't typically someone who forgot the words to the songs he sang. This, all these examples stut of his life of him being able to recite to sing from memory massive amounts of stuff. I'm worried about. I'm interested about that. There's a little slip I'm worried about, I 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 him, because you're right now, you're immersed in him. Oh I am. I've been singing this song under my breath for months. I can't understand why I've never been an Elvis fan. I don't own a single song of his, or am I am? I drawn to this story because isn't this story that I'm talking to you 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 what. I take up my laptop, pull up YouTube. There's a mountain of Elbos on YouTube, one of the last performances of his life. It's bananas, I mean, just it's He's singing a song he's singing thousands of times, and he just completely loses control of it. I can skip that here coming from I wonder if two loss of a light. You know someone said the roles will state it's in e mus play a party. I've been here playing him early in A plus tax. You read your lian select clearly now I'm missing it. Came back to if I got the word save to change. When I first saw it it as someone in a 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 I'm like, well, I remember, really Goon during your life. I'm gonna go on living without you. Now the stage is bear and I'm standing there without any hair. I don't know if you will come back to me. With every live performance he's ever given of this that we have on tape, he mangles the bridge, can't do it right. It's he's returning to the song again and again and again and again and again and doing the same. In this particular, it's always a bridge of singing part. He's almost over. How many years did this go on years. Okay. In nineteen eighty two, this life and Version was really in the UK and reached on the twenty five 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 stay apart. God. There's sweat and tears streaming down his face and I had no calls to don It goes on like this, on and on your baby shoe again, Dolly, that's it man? Fourty years. I another Verian. Well, I'm doing sere. Have you ever played a song before? No? I never played it before, And it's funny. I played a bunch of check I played a bunch of his stuff. Do you want to put us 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 his 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? Song's a concert? Sometimes? I do? Love what's up treating me? Oh? Love me, love me? Dream and just sing. I was gonna say, don't stop, I'm enjoying it. Anything any other ones you do? Wait, by the way, why do you why that one? What's it about that song? I had heard that early from a band called the Flat Too. A jet said I really liked and I didn't know it was Elvis. And then when I'd heard the Elvis version, I had connected the two, like, oh no, I really and I started doing it. When I put in coffee houses, I started playing that. I was like sixteen yea that goes back, which is funny. I eventually heard a story of Robert Plant telling Elvis he loved that song, and led Zeppelin met Elvis, and then when they walked out out of the hallway that Elvis poked his head out in the hallway and sang that song to Robert Plant. They sang it back to each other and you're crying and must have been an amazing moment. Jack White owns the original ascetate pressing of Elvis's first recording from nineteen fifty three, My Happiness. After we talked, White took me into his vault to show it to me. It's priceless. He asked me if I weren't 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. And are you lonesome tonight? All right? Let me see if we can take a crack. I might have to give her coup worlds. What are your lonesome tonight? Do you miss me tonight? Are you sorry? We drifted apart? Does your memor re strength? You are brightsong moday? We're not show and called you a sweetheart? Do the chair in your power, seam and dey and bear? Do you gaze as your door step and picture me? Then? Is your heart feel with pain? Shall I come back? Yeah? Tell? Are you lonesome? Tone? That's the first half of the song. The song version all questions a man is wondering whether his lover misses him. Then comes the spoken bridge, in which the emotional tables are turned and the man leaves himself bare. Are you learnesome Tonight? Has been recorded countless times over the years. A lot of performers leave out the bridge because it's corny and way too long and hard. Elvis kept it in, so does Jack White. I wonder if you're lonesome tonight. You know someone said that the wilds of stage and each must play a part. If you'd had me playing in love with you as my sweetom, that one was where we had I loved you at first glance. You read your line so cleverly, You've never missed a Q thing came back too. You seem to change, You're acted strange and why I've never known? Honey. You lied when you said you loved me, and I had no cause to doubt you. But I'd rather go on hearing your lies. I'm gonna go on living without Now the stage is there and I'm standing there with emptiness all around. If you won't come back to me and then you bring the curtain back, is your heart fill play? Shall I come back again? Tell me so too? WHOA wait? You would you enjoyed that I did? It gets I gets there's some nice parts where it gets the you can see up playing that live now. I just did that, like well, we just did that. I played it once yesterday like reading this, but now playing like that, I could see while live you could really that really could get to be in 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. Um. What just occurred to me now is he doesn't he doesn't. He doesn't really care that if she's lonesome, he's lonesome. That's the singer is lonesome. And it's a it's a mcguffin to pretend like I'm 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. Um, 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 the time, it could be a real you could be onto something there. It could be a real diversion that it's too powerful. What's fascinating is the the song parts, the singer is in control and he's worried about her. Right the spoken parts, the singer is vulnerable, he's confessing his own and it's still 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 like seventeen convolutions of neuroticism. Because he's still he's 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 We'll wait a minute, it's a waltz. You know you have that. So if I'm like, I wonder if two three so one two three one two three, 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 each play a part. Then it starts to get that's it breaks down. Yeah, I mean would, I mean I would. I can definitely say that this would be a lot easier someone else was playing guitar and I could just recite, uh that part which I recited while you played a guitar. Yeah, I'm not going to torch you with my rendition of the spoken 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 uh, you lose the first three lines fate had me playing in love you as my sweetheart? Or even act one was when we met? Why why don't they just start with act one? That act one was where you met I loved you at first class. You read your lines so carefully, never missed a Q. When I do there, you say carefully instead of cleautiful, then came back to you seem to change. You acted strange. What did Jack White do there? The actual lyric is you read your lines so cleverly, He said, you read your line so carefully carefully for cleverly, 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 para praxis 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're 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 same where we do the same kind of thing. We perform, and we go on stages and we make records and all this stuff. I'm from a different time period, but you notice these tiny little moments that are when you see certainly went, oh, I know exactly what that's about. I don't know exactly what that feels like. There are ten known live recordings of Elvis performing Are You Lonesome Tonight, starting in nineteen sixty one in a concert at Bloc Arena in Honolulu, up to the end of Elvis's life in nineteen seventy seven. Alan Elms and Bruce Heller analyze them all in their essay Twelve Ways to Say Lonesome, Assessing error and control in the music of Elvis Presley. Elms and Heller find that Elvis performs the sung portion of all 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 spoken bridge, the narrator is suddenly the one who's been deceived and rejected and that's the part Elvis can't get right. Elms and Heller count total of a hundred and nine errors in those ten live performances of The Spoken Bridge, twenty nine of which involved 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 conditions of the Bridge are the later ones, which come after the summer of nineteen seventy two. What happens in the summer of nineteen seventy two? And one day you went in and said I'm leaving. There was another man in your life. He was your karate teacher, right, Mike Stone. And you went off then and lived with him. Priscilla Presley back on the couch with Barbara Walters, America's primetime Freudian. It was said that Elvis tried to kill him or wanted him killed, right? Do you believe that? I think at that time, yes, he did. He wanted that to happen. I du the chasing your father seeing empteed? Do you game that your bullhead? I wish you had her? Fool with pain? Shall I come back to me? Dude? Are you lost? Lord? Lord? I want to A man who fears betrayal an abandonment, is betrayed and abandoned. I had no call to Dog. It's too much. He's a wreck. Your baby shot. Come again, Tobby, Dude, are you lonesome? After I left Jack White, I went to see Bobby Braddock just down the street at the Sony Studios on Nashville's Music Row. 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 across alto thirty something, long red hair, the kind of person who if you touch you expect a little jolt of static work. Young. We were in the biggest of the Sony recording studios, on the main floor, in a corner where the piano was Casey sang are you lonesome? Tonight? With Bobby on the piano toss me are you Sobby? 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 Christ long leader and really wanted to be a Jordinaire badly, And so ray Walker was one of the Jordanaires, and he tried to emulate him by way of dress and hairstyle. And so I grew up either hearing him say hello, darling nastasy or doing this sort of you know, is it vaudeville style or just just sort of a over the top modeling style. I guess is modeling the way you'd say it modeling. 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 Braddock's most famous songs, he stopped loving her to stay recitation, Yeah you could sing that. She came to see him one last time. We all wonder if she and that works either way. But this is just like, uh, we got this song, let's get a recitation. Threw it in there and they office made it work. And I'm thinking, just instinctively, just because he was h he was just so good. Recitations are unusual these days. Braddock hasn't written one since something he did for Toby Keith in the nineteen nineties. Last successful recitation. Your song I ham was actually it was a well, actually it was it was it was a hip hop thing. I want to talk about me. That was talking talking, talking what I'm thinking about, But it was you know what can you you can? You can you pay a little slice of that? You remember I never do that? Why do that always? I always do it with with with a karaoke thing where I get up there and play the thing. I want to talk about me, I want to talk about I want to talk about number one or now. You talk about your work, how your boss is a jerk, You talk about your church in your head and when your urse, talk about the trouble you've been having with your mother and your daddy, with your brother and your daddy and your mother and your crazy Acts lover, you know, and then and then the minstrel menstrual period of line, which everybody said, you can't put that in a song, nobody'll ever cut it, you know, And it was one of the biggest songs. They were about your medical charts and when you start check that out, nobody recording to He's probably the only one who would have though. Then I showed them the prize. I brought it my bag, my copy of the Handbook of Psychobiography containing the Heller and Elms essay. Hold on, I'll have my book here. I'll tell you the specimen is fascinating. To a pair of Elvis fanatics. It was like I'd unearthed the Dead Sea scrolls. What's the book. It's the book called Handbook of Psychobiography, and it has an essay on this song. Wow, psycho biography and so yeah, So here's so this guy has gone through. He've made a chart of all of the lyrical mistakes that Elvis made an every known live recording of. 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 multivate story, it was my dad. And so I finally was like, you know what, why aren't 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 this 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. She's lived every life but her own, and it's gone. I can't remember it right now. I don't know that feeling. I can't remember it. She's always been somebody something's been everything but alone, a daughter, a mother, a lot, a daughter, a lover, hawife, and a mother. She's lived to every life but her own. 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 what it feels like to be free, But she's always imagined being nobody's nothing, And that's something she never want to be. But that line usually is just gone. And um, a lot of times I'll go hold on and divert and tell a funny story really quickly. Um yeah, wait, what's the specific line that's gone? Is which one? Uh? Let's gone again? Um, she's always been somebody something that's been everything but a daughter, a daughter, a lover, a wife, and a mother. She's been everything but alone. Yeah yeah, why is it that longe? I don't know. I think that, Um, I don't know. I think when you've even 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 stuff. 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 eighteen thousand times out of the gate or you know, officially the first two and um, not being a mother and we're still real closer, right, Yeah, I love her. Go to church where they're right? Do I sit still? Because she makes me and I stay awake. It's good when I when I was a kid, if I get bored in church and my mother reached him and pinch me, Oh, I got smacked. We Casey, can you play that song for us? Is it's going to be two let's say, okay, okay, Well we'll see if this happens. She grew up playing cowgirl in Bill Road Town, dreaming. She'd see, Oh, shoot, hold on, there's a little linebout Elvis in this. That's just random. Hold on dreaming. See she Hollywood, I'm gonna go again. What did I just say? Sorry, I'm thinking about mom. She grew up playing cow girl. She grew up playing cowgirl in Bellroad Town, dreamings. She'd see HollyHood Sunday. She knew Sunday distant Friday night with a singer. It just right. They would come and carry away as as far shakes safe from that's all right. Hold one 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. Any work and address her Mamma made, she looked down, grown up standing there like that, had a honeymoon in Memphis Town. Yeah, she looked for out us all around, made loving the gray. How coming back as far as she could see from there, those were just the backslide. You went from somebody's daughter somebody's wife. A parapraxis is not failure. When the performer slips, the audience is not cheated. It's the opposite. Parapraxis 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 Alvis 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 hit sang a thousand times only now in a way that gave the audience a window on his pane. Mistakes reveal our vulnerabilities. They are the way the world understands us, the way performers make their performances real. So Bobby Braddick 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, somebody something. She's been everything, daughter, daughter, mother, wife, fan, mother, She's lit every life. But she'd say, that's just called and a woman. She's always there somebody, So God's beautiful. Why are you covering your mouth? I'm just that'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, too many songs in there. But at any point in time, I could pull out a rap from new edition from nineteen eighty two, 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, And if you like this episode, you'll enjoy my new series launching later this year. It's called Broken Record, and you can subscribe right now on Apple Podcasts. Revisionist History is a Upleat production. The senior producer is Mia LaBelle, with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to Kim Green and Hal Humphreys of Storyboard EMP in Nashville and here in New York. Thanks to Jason Gambrel, Evan Viola, Rachel Strom, Nicole Bunsis, Kate Mescal, Kristin Mindzer, Carly Migliori, Andy Bowers, and of course el Hefe Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladmow Okay, so it will be. I wonder if you're lonesome tonight. You know, someone said that the world's a stage and each must play a part. Fate had been playing in love you as my sweetheart. Act one was when we met. I loved you at first glance. You read your line so cleverly. Never missed a Q then came back two. You seem to change, and you acted strange, and why I'll never know. Honey. You lied when you said you loved me, and I had no cause to doubt you. But I'd rather go on hearing your lives than 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, then make them bring the curtain down. How about doing nice, very good? I must say I'm not very musical. Now it's very good, it's good.