Loughead

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a hangar: a wrench, a wing panel, wind through a door)
It's spelled L-O-U-G-H-E-A-D.
Say that. Go on. That's the problem.

[Verse 1]
Two brothers in California building aeroplanes by hand,
Allan and Malcolm, and their name was Loughead,
which is Scots, and which is pronounced exactly like "Lockheed,"
but nobody could see that, so nobody ever said it —
they said LOG-head. They said LOFF-head. They said everything but right.
And the brothers heard their own name mangled every single day.

[Chorus]
So they changed the spelling! They changed it to the sound!
L-O-C-K-H-E-E-D, so America could say it!
They didn't change the name. That's the part I want to stress.
They changed the LETTERS so the name would come out right.
Loughead. Lockheed. Same word. Same men.
One of them's just written the way it always sounded.

[Verse 2]
And that's the same move Ettore made with Boiardi,
and Marcel Bich made with Bic, dropping the h off the end
so English speakers wouldn't read it as a word he didn't want,
and Faktorowicz became Factor at a desk on Ellis Island —
though that one wasn't chosen. That one was done to him.
There's a difference between changing it and having it changed.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
It's a small surrender and it's also very practical.
You can hold both. I hold both. I don't think it's a tragedy
to spell yourself the way the country hears you,
so the country can say your name without embarrassment.
But something goes, in the transaction. Something always goes.
The Scots in it. The grandfather in it. The old spelling.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the hangar door rolling shut)
Loughead.
It was always pronounced Lockheed. That was never the problem.