The meaning of "blue canoe" in the lyrics of "Where to Now, St. Peter" sung by Elton John

I think your friend's interpretation of 'blue canoe' (ACW Confederate soldiers' slang for bullet) may be correct, although I've not been able to find any confirmation of that. However, I don't think that 'I took myself..." means 'I shot myself', rather it's the sense of 'I took a bullet' (i.e. was shot). For the rhythm of the song, it scans better to say 'I took myself a blue canoe' rather than 'I took me a blue canoe' ('I [xxx] me a common Southern idiom, e.g. 'I drank me a beer'.) So, 'I took myself a blue canoe' = I got shot.

'Sweet young foreign gun' would then be the soldier who shot him, 'gun' in this context being a someone who uses a gun. Taupin uses the same term elsewhere on the album: 'Ballad of a Well-Known Gun', i.e. a gunslinger.

There is also a pun in the last line of the last verse: 'Something for nothing always ending with a bad report', 'report' also having the meaning of an explosive noise, e.g. the report of a rifle (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/report), as well as the line '...in such a silent place as this, beyond the rifle range'.

I always thought the line 'Insane they took the paddles, my arms they paralysed' was a reference to medics trying to get the wounded man to safety, but, as mawsco so rightly said, songwriters put song lyrics together for the way they sound as well as meaning (if any).

At the time he wrote the lyrics to Tumbleweed Connection, Bernie Taupin was fascinated by the history and culture of the American South and the [American] Civil War era in particular; this theme is carried through much, if not all, of the album. 'Where to Now, St. Peter' is a hauntingly beautiful song about a young Confederate soldier who has been shot, is dying, and is contemplating what happens next. It's also a song about that soldier's faith - 'I may not be a Christian, but I've done all one man can'.

Sorry for the long answer, but this has been one of my all-time favorite songs for decades.

Well, I guess you have to be a child of the sixties to really understand this. I ran into blue canoes at Woodstock. On the way in I had a sack full of oranges and kept giving them out to people — it was a hot day and it was about a five mile walk to Yasgur's Farm. And nearly every time I gave someone an orange they gave me back either some smoke of some downers or some acid or several other things I knew not what they were. When I got to the site, there was a wooded area at the back (the site was like a natural amphitheatre with the stage at the lowest point) near where the Hog Farm set up and served granola and a strange sort of think gruel and other stuff. A little further to the side Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters parked their psychedelic schoolbus and administered electric koolaid acid tests.

Well, the wooded area had two paths that crossed in the middle, and that is where all the drug dealers set up shop, usually displaying their wares on upturned cardboard boxes. So on arriving I walked back to the pharmacopeia and got the experts to identify several of my until-then unidentified acquisitions. I had been given two rather large blue pills in a capsule not unlike the cylindrical ones with rounded ends that many over the counter drugs come in. The experts identified these as "Blue Canoes" = mescaline. I had done mescaline before and rather enjoyed it, so I retained those (though I traded most of my downers and assorted others for purple microdot or orange sunshine whenever possible — the exchange rate was a bit high, but well worth it).

So the answer is, "I took myself a blue canoe, and I floated like a leaf" means "I dropped some mescaline and tripped". Evidently Sir Elton's trip was a mixture of good and bad — paralysed arms, but also "dazzling, dancing, half-enchanted".

By the way, the reference to Merlin reinforces this. If you check it out, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who first described Merlin in the 12th century, called him Merlin Ambrosius, from ambrosia which is from the Greek and Latin meaning "elixir of life".

It got me through the rainstorm on Sunday, and if the truth be known for a time there I was dazzling, dancing, half enchanted.