umgawa
black power
your mama need a shower
'cause she stiiiinks

Mary,
Bless us all ;) so did we. How I forget! My new (old) house has a hopscotch game set into its drive. I'm keeping it although I can't quite remember the rules.
Janet



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited February 17, 2006).]

What about this one, which we did to clapping games:

Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,
all dressed in black, black, black,
with silver buckles, buckles, buckles
all down her back, back, back

She asked her mother, mother, mother
for fifty cents, cents, cents
to see an elephant, elephant, elephant
jump over the fence, fence, fence

etc.

By the way, I think the Simpsons generation are doing a little of this, because my daughter went through this phase at about 9 at just the age I did.

Of course we used to do the counting-out ones too, definitely a tiger, and definitely there was an odd-even thing as to who you;d end up picking! There were several endings to eenie-meenie-miney-mo, and you could draw it out almost indefinitely if you wanted to pick a certain person.

KEB

No one has mentioned what I think might be a universal one for the nursery school crowd while holding hands and walking in a circle:

Ring around a rosey,
pocket full of posey.
Ashes, ashes.
All fall down!

Mary

Yes, indeed. This was our local version:

Ring a ring o'roses
A pocketful of posies
atishoo, atishoo
We all fall down.

It's a folk memory of the Black Death, I believe.

For terror you couldn't beat this one. Two people formed an arch with linked hands held above the heads of the circle of children who filed through it until the unfortunate child had its head "chopped off" by the two people who formed the arch.

"Oranges and lemons",
say the bells of Saint Clements.
"When will you pay me?"
say the bells of Old Bailey.
"When I grow rich",
say the bells of Shoreditch.
"When will that be?"
say the bells of Stepney.
"I do not know"
says the Great Bell of Bow.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
and here comes a chopper to chop off your head.



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited February 19, 2006).]

I don't remember the tiger replacing the N word in that little ditty but I didn't hear the N word version in my yard. My mother must have changed the word herself, teaching it to me thusly: "Catch a piggy by the toe." I look back on little graces like that and smile.

She wanted me to speak properly. When she read aloud this poem to me from Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses:

A birdie with a yellow bill
Hopped upon my window sill,
Cocked his shining eye and said:
"Ain't you 'shamed, you sleepy-head!"

She said "Aren't you ashamed, you sleep-head." Mother wasn't a metricist!

Not a verse exactly, but there was this little abcedarian chant we little girls used to do when playing with our Spalding balls ("Spaldeens," we called them in the Bronx), bouncing them on the pavement and weaving them through our legs and such:

A my name is Annie
And my father's name is Abe
We come from Alabama
And we sell Apples!

B my name is Bonnie
And my father's name is Bob
We come from Boston
And we sell Biscuits.

The idea was to change the last word in each line at will to any ol' word that came to mind, as long as it began with the right letter.

Kate,
I had an aunt, (F. Alexa Stevens) in New Zealand who was internationally known as an educationalist and, in a smaller way, as a poet. She introduced children's verse-speaking choirs into the English-speaking world. (I have read that they were started before WW2 in Germany.)

Before I could walk she spotted me as a verbal baby and had me reciting the above poem in my pram. Your story is the first time I have heard of anyone else being taught that poem.

My aunt's New Zealand school choirs were broadcast on the BBC during WW2. I was taken to see her conduct a choir when I was small. She wore a floating dark chiffon dress and conducted them as though they were an orchestra. I still remember the rapt faces of the children as they chanted a poem based on a Maori legend"
"Come out Te Rauparaha,
Come out red nose hiding in the rapu."

Janet

In the way of counting or skipping rhymes, we used:

Mary and Johnny, sitting in a tree,
K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
How many kisses did she get?
One, two...

The "children's culture" is probably indeed dying, as video games take the place of the folk rhymes handed down through the ages.

In the way of racial songs, we had one about "the old bald-headed Chinese", which I no longer remember except for the concluding lines:
We buried him deep and he stuck out his feet,
The old bald-headed Chinese.

And this one:
My name is Solomon Levi
And my store's on Salem Street,
That's where you buy your coats and hats
And everything else that's neat.
I've second handed ulsterets*
And overcoats so fine
For all the boys that trade with me
At a hundred-and-forty-nine.
Oh Solomon Levi! Tra la la la la la la....

*God knows what an ulsteret is, but we sang it.

Also we sang the endless verses of "Found a Peanut", which ends with the hapless peanut eater shelling peanuts in hell.

In response to Deborah, about the Little Willies, here is one we used to sing at parties:

We knew that he was dying by the color of his breath,
The flowers they were wilting in the mud.
And the doctors all agreed the way to save our Willie's life
Was to stop the circulation of the blood.

So we gently dipped his head in a pot of boiling lead
And laid our Little Willie down to rest.
But some burglars came at night, and they came without a light,
And they stole the mustard plaster off his chest.

On the twenty-third of May our Little Willie passed away,
In spite of all that we could do to save,
So I'm going to the barber shop to grant his last request,
And plant a bunch of whiskers on his grave.

No more upon the mat will be play with pussy cat,
No more between his teeth he'll pinch her tail.
No more he'll shove her nose against that red hot iron stove,
Because our Little Willie's kicked the pain.