A Little Protestant Humor

As I recently wrote also about America's "Sister Golden Hair", several friends, acquaintances, and I were in a recent discussion about songs that reminded us of being a kid, and quite a lot of that discussion brought up comments by many of summertime occasions as children. Several of us, in fact, cited by name the song "Joy to the World" by Three Dog Night (probably because that band had been the initial topic of the conversation).

One woman involved in the discussion recalled trips to the beach in Georgia with her family as a child. For me, it was yet another of those songs I remembered blaring on the radio at the country club pool in the summers, and very specifically one day on the AM radio in my grandmother's car, driving home from an afternoon spent down at the lake.

However, this song holds an additional, and funny, memory for me, and is one of those family legends now as well.

I was very young when the song was on the charts - only four years old - and it was another of those that I developed the annoying habit of singing all the time, and most of my family was probably sick to death of hearing after a while.

Good little Episcopalian child that I was, I thought they were singing "Joy to the BISHOPS in the deep blue sea".

It was years before I realized it was "Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea".

I suppose it never occurred to me why there would be bishops at the bottom of the sea (or the fact that if they were, they would be drowned and dead and not terribly joyous), but nobody ever told me any different and just laughed. I eventually figured out the "fishes" part on my own a few years later.