Franklin scholars say that the lyrics to “Ben Franklin’s Song,” while they riff on true tidbits about his life, do take some creative liberties with how it all went down.
“The historical outlines of the lyrics are sound,” says historian H.W. Brands, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin. “He went to France to get money for guns and other supplies in the Revolution.”
References to “some lightning, a kite, and a fat brass key” do correspond with an experiment Franklin did, though he gets more credit (in the song and in general) than he should for what the experiment uncovered. As the Franklin Institute has noted, “Benjamin Franklin did not discover electricity during this experiment — or at all, for that matter. Electrical forces had been recognized for more than a thousand years, and scientists had worked extensively with static electricity. Franklin’s experiment demonstrated the connection between lightning and electricity.” As for whether they were “putting up streetlights in Gay Paris” during Franklin’s time there, which the song suggests, the first electric street lamps in the city of light wouldn’t show up until decades after Franklin went home.
The description of Franklin’s son gets points for accuracy — he was in fact on the “wrong side” of the Revolution, as the song puts it, having landed himself in jail while working with British and their loyalists — and it’s true that Franklin had a tense relationship with John Adams. As Brands simply puts it, “Franklin was wining and dining Paris elites.”