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Comment by jollofricepeas | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. It’s great that we’re starting to learn more about US history. There’s so many untold stories that need to be told.

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Country music sometimes has a chorus that changes interpretation* after each verse; in one case I encountered a song where the verses themselves changed interpretation after I'd learned some North American history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931615

* are there any other genres which do this?

It's quite common in folk music to use clever metaphors to cloak a song's true meaning. For example, the traditional English folk tune "John Barleycorn" looks like a murder ballad at first sight, but is in fact describing the harvest of barley and it's many uses (especially alcoholic!):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barleycorn

Country music has strong roots in English and Irish folk music, so there are a lot of thematic crossovers.

Follow-up comments:

- its* (facepalm)

- The excellent folk music website MainlyNorfolk has a fascinating amount of detail about this tune: https://mainlynorfolk.info/lloyd/songs/johnbarleycorn.html

> ...the sceptical incline to think it may be an invention or refurbishing carried out by some educated antiquarian. If so, he did his work long ago and successfully, for the ballad was already in print in the early years of the seventeenth century...

That's an amusing possibility. I'm inclined to assign authorship of JB to "Trad." but do believe I ran into a similar case of a joke running for a few thousand years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39658391

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