Titanic Controversy!!

November 20, 2014: From your webmaster: At an on-site reunion at camp in 2011, someone mentioned to me that the lyrics we were singing for the Titanic song were wrong. "Oh?" I replied. Seems there is a non-rhyming phrase in the first verse. The way we had been singing it for decades was:

Oh they built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue,
And they thought they had a ship that the waves would never go through.
But the Lord's almighty hand said the ship would never float.
It was sad when the great ship went down.

The corrected lyrics, or so I was told at the time, should be:

Oh they built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue,
And they thought they had a ship that the waves would never go through.
But the Lord's almighty hand said the ship would never stand.
It was sad when the great ship went down.

There is no explanation why this is hitting me now. Most likely it has to do with the 12" of snow that Jimmy Feinstein, John Rosenberg, Jeff Rissman, Sandh Mahr, Rick Prizant, Rick Shamberg, Tony Edmonds, Wes Jung, Errol Grisard, Pete Jocketty, and Steve Stoltz and I received last week here in Minnesota. Paul Warshauer, also in Minnesota, didn't get as much, so we have no sympathy for him. The wintry weather obviously got me thinking about Camp Waupaca, and this is what has been bothering me.

I did a little research to see if this suggested lyric change was appropriate. To my shock, there are lots of different lyrics for the Titanic song. Some match ours somewhat, and there are verses I never even heard of! To point out the vast variation of verses, here are a few links you can look at to see what other interpretations of the Titanic song are: GIRL SCOUT VERSION, and: BOY SCOUT VERSION, or: YET ANOTHER VERSION.

As you can see, there are many different versions of the Titanic song lyrics. When I first started my research, I was going to make a recommendation to the group that we modify our lyrics to keep good poetic rhyming form. However, in light of this research the discovery that no-two-lyrics-are-the-same, I am recommending that we keep OUR lyrics just as we have been singing them for decades, with no modification:

Oh, they built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue, And they thought they had a ship that the waves would never go through. But the Lord's almighty hand said the ship would never float stand It was sad when the great ship went down!	Oh, the ship was full of sin and the sides about to burst, When the captain shouted "Women and children first!" So they tried to send a wire but the lines were all on fire. It was sad when the great ship went down! (chorus)
(chorus) Oh, it was sad! Oh, it was sad! It was sad when the great ship went down to the bottom of the . . . Uncles and aunts, little kiddies lost their pants. Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives. It was sad when the great ship went down!	Oh, they threw the life boats out o'er the deep and raging sea, When the band struck up with "Nearer My God to Thee." Little children screamed and cried as the waves swept overside. It was sad when the great ship went down! (chorus)
Oh, they sailed from England and were almost to the shore, When the rich refused to associate with the poor. So they put them down below where they were the first to go. It was sad when the great ship went down! (chorus)	Oh, the moral of the story, as you can plainly see, Is to wear a life preserver on the dark and raging sea. The Titanic never made it and never more shall be. It was sad when the great ship went down! (chorus)