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All He Left Us Was ...?

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The term "mondegren" means a mis-hearing of a song's lyrics, generally in a way that makes its own kind of sense.

The term comes from a common mishearing of the phrase "laid him on the green" in a Scottish ballad: The Bonnie Earl of Moray. The first verse runs:

Ye Hielan's an' ye Lowlan's 
O, where have ye been? 
They have slain the Earl of Moray 
And lain him on the green.

 If you hear that last bit, "Lady Mondegren" then the the bastards involved (the Gordons of Huntly) have committed two assassinations. The Gordons were cruel, but their cruelty was sex balanced. 

 Anyway, I have been thinking lately of a very different song. "Papa was a rolling stone," by The Temptations.  The key lyrics here are: "When he died, all he left us was alone." 

 Now, I take the spelling "alone" direct from a lyrics site. It is the generally accepted spelling. But for years before it became so easy to check these things, I heard the line as "a loan." Papa left his family a loan?  well ... that seemed to me a non-literal way of saying Papa left them burdened with debts. 

 "All he left us was a loan" isn't really a mondegren, though. I heard the lyrics perfectly, and for all I know the alternative meaning might have been intended, at least as a message for subliminal perception, from the start. 

 Let's call it an Easter egg, on that hypothesis.  
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