On a Dark Dessert Highway

To quote extensively (and effusively) from Wikipedia,
"A mondegreen /ˈmɒndɪɡriːn/ is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning.^[1] Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.^[2][3] 

"American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, writing that as a girl, when her mother read to her from Thomas Percy's 1765 book Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, she had misheard the lyric "layd him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen" in the fourth line of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray".

"The creation of mondegreens may be driven in part by cognitive dissonance, as the listener finds it psychologically uncomfortable to listen to a song and not make out the words. Steven Connor suggests that mondegreens are the result of the brain's constant attempts to make sense of the world by making assumptions to fill in the gaps when it cannot clearly determine what it is hearing. 

"Connor sees mondegreens as the "wrenchings of nonsense into sense".^[a] This dissonance will be most acute when the lyrics are in a language in which the listener is fluent.

"James Gleick claims that the mondegreen is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Without the improved communication and language standardization brought about by radio, he believes there would have been no way to recognize and discuss this shared experience.^[11] Just as mondegreens transform songs based on experience, a folk song learned by repetition often is transformed over time when sung by people in a region where some of the song's references have become obscure. 

"A classic example is "The Golden Vanity",^[12] which contains the line "As she sailed upon the lowland sea". British immigrants carried the song to Appalachia, where singers, not knowing what the term lowland sea refers to, transformed it over generations from "lowland" to "lonesome"."

But I enjoy the more musical ones myself, even if the original artists got them wrong. 
-bill kenny