There's a world of tradition there.
Anyone else interested?
Here's a couple for starters.
Best,
David

'Queen, Queen Caroline,
Washed her hair in turpentine,
Turpentine to make it shine,
Queen, Queen Caroline.'

'My mother said I never should
Play with the gypsies in the wood.
When I did, she would say
You naughty girl to disobey:
Your hair won't grow, your shoes won't shine
You naughty girl, you shan't be mine!'

Hi David,

I don't suppose the Simpson's generation use these and I guess they must be dying out fast.

Here's a counting-out rhyme we used in Northumberland in the 1950's and early 60's.

Dibso magso,
who's on?
Not you.

There was another -

It started

Ickle ockle black bottle....infuriating, I can't remember the rest.

Of course we used Eenie Meanie Miney Mo...but the second line is so un-PC I'm afraid I can't bring myself to admit to it!

There was a hiding game involving secreting a tennis ball in your clothing, I seem to remember much rummaging to retrieve it, but then they did not have social workers back then!

The rhyme went:

Queenie queenie
who's got the ball?
It isn't in my pocket,
it wasn't me who took it.
Queenie queenie
who's got the ball?

There were lots of skipping rhymes too - my sister might remember a few.

cheers

Alan



[This message has been edited by Alan Wickes (edited February 13, 2006).]

Well, Alan, may as well get this one down before it finally disappears:

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,
Catch a nigger by his toe;
If he squeals let him go,
Eeeny, meeny, miny, mo.
YOU ARE IT.

I think there are many variations. Amazingly by today's standards, we thought nothing of it at primary school; it was just a counting rhyme.
Best,
David

Here's the variation I remember from childhood:

Eeny Meeny Miney Mo
Catch a nigger by his toe
If he hollers make him pay
Fifty dollars every day.
O-U-T spells out goes you,
You old dirty dishrag YOU!

We thought nothing of that one, either. But this next one I knew was naughty, because it made me feel sorry for the one little quadroon or mulatto boy in our rural Alabama elementary school (first through 4th grades, 1935-9). Of course we children were thoughtless, but so were our teachers...good teachers and otherwise kind ladies but, in retrospect...thoughtless:

Nigger, Nigger, pull your trigger
Up and down the Coosa River.
Snotty nose, ragged clothes,
That's the way the nigger goes.
My mammy told me to choose this very ONE!

G/W

By the time it came to me in northern California in the late 60s/early 70s, it had become significantly more PC:

Eenie Meanie Minie Moe
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers, make him pay
Twenty dollars every day.
My mother said to pick the very best one and you are not IT.

Other counting rhymes of that era:

Mickey Mouse built a house. How many bricks did he use?

*answer*

One two three (and so on) and you are not it.

Another quick counting out rhyme:

Twenty horses in a stable. One jumped OUT.

Interestingly, there's a folklore paper I've read (fairly easy to find) which traces the variations of Eenie Meanie Minie Moe and finds that the first line is extremely ancient and likely goes back to a druidic rite to choose "one" (eenie) to go across the straits of Menai (meanie) to the isle of Mona (minie) to get sacrificed. I'm not certain of the thoughts on "moe" but it's certainly the start of "mortis" so it seems to follow.

I am currently up to my ears in counting rhymes, etc. My toddler got a four CD set of nursery rhymes and playground tunes. While a rather shocking number have had the violence edited out of them (the farmer's wife now cuts the mice slices of cheese with a carving knife! And the Old Woman who Lives in a Shoe hugs and kisses her children before sending them to bed!), I have also been musing lately on the number of head injuries in children's rhymes, as, for instance:

It's raining, it's pouring
The old man is snoring
He bumped his head and went to bed
And couldn't get up in the morning

I mean, heavens, the man is clearly in a coma!

And then of course there is the thinly-veiled sexual content of many a jumprope rhyme, often involving doctors being sent for:

Cinderella
Dressed in yella
Went upstairs to see her fella
How many kisses did she get?
one two three, etc.

Followed by:

Cinderella
Dressed in yella
Went upstairs to kiss her fella
By mistake
She kissed a snake
How many doctors did it take?

As for un-PC nursery rhymes, this one seems innocent enough:

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear,
Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair,
Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy, was he?

until you realize that Fuzzy Wuzzy was a term British soldiers used for warriors in the Sudan, see Kipling's Fuzzy Wuzzy

Tell tale tit
Yer mammy cannae knit
Yer daddy’s in the dustbin
eating fish’n’chips!

*

I am a little Dutch girl
as pretty as can be be be
and all the boys at my school
go crazy over me me me.

My boyfriend’s name is Leslie.
He looks like Elvis Presley
with his ten fine toes and a pimple on his nose,
and this is how my story goes;

One day while I was walking,
I saw my boyfriend talking
to a little girl with golden hair
and this is what he said to her,

“I L-O-V-E love you
I K-I-S-S kiss you
down by the R-I-V-E-R,
River Olé!”

While we did not have "Liar! liar!Pants on fire," we did have a version of "Tattle tale tit," and also an accusatory rhyme for cowardice:

Coward! coward!
Buttermilk soured.
Hasn't been churned in twenty-four hours.

When this was resented, the accused might say:

"You're a liar."
"You're another one and a dog if you take it!"

If a fight began, bystanders would chant:

Fight! fight!
Nigger and a white.
Who's the nigger
and who's the white?

G/W

"We thought nothing of it"

Depends who gets to be one of us.

Best,
Marcia

Anyone remember this one? We did a hand claping game to it. My eyes have been opened to the subject matter as I type this!


Miss Suzy had a baby
she named him Tiny Tim
She put him in the bathtub
to she if he could swim

He drank up all the water
and ate up all the soap
He tried to eat the bathtub
but it wouldn't go down his throat

Miss Suzy called the doctor
Miss Suzy called the nurse
Miss Suzy called the lady
with the alligator purse

Mumps, said the doctor
Measles, said the nurse
(it gets fuzzy here but I think it was something like)
Out walked the lady
with the baby in her purse?

http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch...undrhymes.html

and
http://www.odps.org/glossword/index.php?a=list&d=3


**

Google "playground rhymes" for a wealth of such pages.

Good topic!

[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited February 14, 2006).]

G/W,

I had those growing up, too, sorry to say. I also have the Coosa River running through town, or is it out of town, since Rome is where it starts.

I know my dad has passed this down to it's fifth generation, starting at least from his grandfather:

Raccoon's tail has rings all round,
Possum's tail is bare.
Rabbit ain't got no tail at all,
Just a little ball of hair.

---------
Bugsy

.

The Bronx version of the counting-out rhyme that David posted was:

Eenie meenie miny mo
Catch a nigger by the toe
If he hollers let him go
My mother said to pick this one
Out goes Y-O-U

Sometime during my childhood, "nigger" becamed "tiger". PC from the start!

I also have a confession to make. As a very bright, hyper-competitive, obnoxious young prick, I remember that I counted the syllables in this and other rhymes, and figured out exactly where to start with groups of two, three, four and even five other kids in order to pre-direct the supposedly fickle finger of fate. (From there, it was only a half step to Formal poetry.)

Bugsy,

Those two critters got around. We had this one:

'Possum up the 'simmon tree,
Raccoon on the ground.
Raccoon said to the 'possum,
'Throw me some 'simmons down."

Romantic note: In 1897 sweet 16-year-old Norma Roper and her beau, Red Will Hayes (who looked just like Wyatt Earp) eloped from Maplesville, Ala, by train to your town of Rome, Ga., for a quick wedding.It was the first and only time my maternal grandmother ever left the state of Alabama.

History note: In April, 1863, after marching and fighting for seven days and nights, Maj. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest,CSA, ("Get thar fustest with the mostest men") captured an entire Union brigade under Col. A.D. Straight,just across the Coosa River from Rome, Ga.

I daresay you knew about the capture, if not the elopement.

G/W

You're barmy, you're barmy,
your mother's in the army.


------
I sent a letter to my love
and on the way I dropped it.
Someone must have picked it up
and put it in their pocket.

not you--not you--not you

YOU........

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited February 14, 2006).]

Googled "Mr. East gave a feast," and got three pages of results, so it's too well-known, but how about this naughty rhyme, current when I was a kid?

Mr. Brown went to town
On a load of lumber;
Stuck a splinter in his butt
And thought he heard it thunder.

Mr. Brown went to town
On a load of hay;
Mr. Martin came a-fartin'
And blowed it all away.


Then there was this trick:

"Adam and Eve and Pinch Metight
Went over the hill to see the fight.
Adam and Eve came back,
Who stayed to see the fight?"

"Pinch Metight----OUCH!"

Two ways to spell Mississippi:

(1) (By syllables, as learned by my grandmother in elementary school circa 1887) "M-I-S, Mis, S-I-S, sis, Missis, S-I-P, sip, Mississip, P-I, pi, Mississippi."

(2) Funny way: "Em eye crooked-letter crooked-letter eye crooked-letter crooked-letter eye humpback humpback eye."

G/W

Wasn't much for jumprope myself, but the girls on our playground used this one:

Mabel, Mabel, set the table
How many dishes are you able?
One-two-three-(etc.)

And then there are the finger-play rhymes:

Here is the church and here is the steeple
Open the doors, and there are the people.

(Lace your hands together, fingers down inside, palms down to make a rectangle. Put your pinkies up to make the steeple, then unfold your thumbs for the church doors, then invert your hands, fingers still laced, and wiggle fingers for the parishioners.)

The reverse of that was this one:

These are mommy's knives and forks.
This is daddy's table.
This is sister's looking glass
and this is baby's cradle.

(Fingers become the knives and forks, hands turned the other way into the rectangle becomes the table. Putting the pinkies up instead of becoming a steeple becomes the mirror of an old-style vanity, and putting up the index fingers on the other side makes the shape of an old-fashioned cradle.)

There are loads of versions of this one, but this is the one I knew, more or less:

Miss Lucy had a steam boat
The steamboat had a bell,
Miss Lucy went to heaven
The steamboat went to...

Hello operator
Please give me number nine
And if you disconnect me
I'll cut off your...

Behind the 'fridgerator
There was a piece of glass
Miss Lucy sat upon it
And cut her big fat...

Ask me no more questions
I'll tell you no more lies
The boys are in the bathroom
Pulling down their...

Flies are in the meadow
The bees are in the park
The boys and girls are kissing
In the D A R K dark dark dark


Early exercises in zeugma (I know, I know, there are quibbles about the term, still.)

Some of my favorites are the Little Willie rhymes:

Willie, with a thirst for gore,
Nailed the baby to the door.
Mother said, with humor quaint,
'Willie, dear, you'll mar the paint.'

Or:

Little Willie took a mirror,
Licked the mercury right off,
Thinking in his childish folly,
It would cure the whooping cough.

'Oh-oh-oh!', said Willie's mother;
'Ah-ah-ah!', said Mrs Brown;
'Twas a chilly day for Willie
When the mercury went down.

Or the variant:

Little Willie now is standing
On the golden shore,
For what he thought was H20
Was H2SO4.

G/W,

"It was the first and only time my maternal grandmother ever left the state of Alabama."

You almost drew an Alabama joke from me with that statement. You'd probably already know it, though, but with the word "Georgia" in all the places it says "Alabama".

---------
Bugsy

.


[This message has been edited by Lightning Bug (edited February 17, 2006).]

Here are a couple from Ulysses (Ch. 14 - "Oxen of the Sun")


THE ARTANE ORPHANS

You big, you bog, you dirty dog!
You think the ladies love you!


THE PRISON GATE GIRLS

If you see kay
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him from me.


------------------
Mark Allinson

Ibitty bibitty
Sibitty sab
Ibitty bib, kanabe
Dictionary
Down the ferry
Shun, shun
the American fun
Born in 1861
____________________________

One potato (pronounced patayda)
Two potato
Three potato
Four

Five potato
Six potato
Seven potato
more

Out goes
Y-O-U

Just today I saw this corrupted version of "William Trimbletoes" on the net:

"William, William Trimble Toes,
he's a good fisherman.
Catch his hands,
put 'em in the pans,
some lay eggs some not,
wire, briar, limber lock
three geese in the flock,
one flew east, a one flew west,
one flew over the cuckoo's nest;
o u t spells out, dirty dish rag
you go out!"

Whereas I learned from my Scotch-Irish elders the following:

"William, William Trimbletoes,
he's a good fisherman,
catches hens, puts them in the pens,
some lay eggs, some none.
Wire, briar, limber, lock,
three geese in a flock.
One flew east, one flew west,
one flew over the cuckoo's nest;
O-U-T spells out goes you,
you old dirty dish rag YOU!"

This shows how folk verse, transmitted orally, can be morphed out of shape and sense. Someone must have understood "catch his hands" for "catches hens" and assumed "pans" for "pens."

G/W

Dan, Dan,
Dirty old man.
Washed his face in a frying pan.
Combed his hair with the leg of a chair.
Dan, Dan, dirty old man.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited February 15, 2006).]

I'll tell me ma when I get home
The boys won't leave the girls alone
They pull my hair, they steal my comb
But that's all right till I get home
She is handsome, she is pretty
She is the belle of Belfast city
She is courting one, two, three
Please, won't you tell me, who is she?


Albert Mooney says he loves her
All the boys are fighting for her
Knock at the door and ring the bell
Hey, my true love, are you well
Out she comes as white as snow
Rings on her fingers, bells on her toes
Our Jenny Murry says she'll die
If she doesn't get the fellow with the roving eye

Sung when jumping rope where one person jumps in as the other jumps out without missing a beat:

On a mountain
stands a lady
who she is
I do not know.

All she wants
is gold and silver;
all she needs
is a nice young man.

So, jump in my ____ (fill in name)
and jump out my _____ (fill in name)

On a mountain (repeat from top)

Talk about universality: so many of these are familiar to me from my childhood, but all with variations.
Mary, our playground version of that one went on, in the first stanza,

On a mountain
stands a lady
who she is
I do not know.
I will court her
for her beauty
she must answer
yes or no.

And that's a lovely old song with a refrain:
"Oh, no John, no John, no John, no."

rotten version of song

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited February 16, 2006).]

Janet - We sang these lines just before the ones you give above:

A tisket, a tasket,
a green and yellow basket.

Iona and Peter Opie have done a scholarly study of playground rimes for Oxford.

Several verses on the Royal fam.

Worth checking out.

Bob

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.