Changing names, the nine lives of a Cat Stevens
Sandy Hutchens wonders: Why do people change their names? Why do corporations change their names?
It all has to do with mergers even on the individual level. When a woman changes her last name to take on the name of her husband – that is the result of a merger. When a person takes on a new name as the result of a religious conversion – that too is the result of a merger. In this case it is a a merging with another religion or another people.
A famous example is Cat Stevens changing his name to Yusuf Islam when he became a Muslim. But what about the name Cat Stevens? Is that an original name or is that yet another aka for something else? In fact it is. The person famously known as Cat Stevens was born Steven Demetre Georgiou. Thinking that his given name might not be memorable to music fans, he chose the stage name Cat Stevens, in part because a girlfriend said he had eyes like a cat, but mainly because he said, “I couldn’t imagine anyone going to the record store and asking for ‘that Steven Demetre Georgiou album’.
Was this subterfuge? An attempt to hide from a previous identity? No. Not at all. Everything was done in the open.
How about the famous Robert Zimmerman? Changing names is a common practice and this blog will examine interesting examples of changing to another name.
Robert Zimmerman: A Hard Names’ A-Gonna Change