What's the oldest children's song you know?

[dreamshark]

Not the ones that are taught by nursery school teachers or popularized by commercial singers from Hopalong Cassidy to Raffi, but the ones that are passed along from child to child through the generations. Jump rope rhymes, silly parodies of popular songs, slightly naughty songs that grownups are not likely to pass along (unexpurgated, anyway) and that kind of thng.

I started thinking about this while commenting to Laramie, where I mentioned "On Top of Spaghetti",  "Jimmy is a friend of mine, he resembles Frankenstein", and the unauthorized version of the Notre Dame Fight Song. But based on internal evidence, I think the oldest one that I actually learned from other kids was this one. I mean, it has late 19th century written all over it, right?

Two Irishmen, two Irishmen, were digging in a ditch.
One called the other a dirty son of a ... 

Birch beer, birch beer, ten cents a glass,
If you do not like it, shove it up your...

Ask me no questions and you will get no answers,
If you do not like it, you can go to...

Hello, operator, give me number nine.
If you cannot reach it, please return my dime.

Comments

[quadong]

You mean,

Hello, operator, please give me number nine,
and if you disconnect me, I'll chop off your

behind the frigerator, there was a piece of glass
Miss Susie sat upon it, and broke her little

ask me no more questions, I'll tell you no more lies
the boys are in the bathroom, zipping up their

flies are in the kitchen, the birds are in the park
Miss Susie and her boyfriend are kissing in the [dark]


At this point it ended on my schoolyard. But the operator part wasn't the beginning. We didn't have the Irishmen. Possibly it was so politically incorrect that it got purged by occasional adult contact.

I feel like with the Internet, it is getting harder to tell what's passed directly from child to child, and what gets revived through written records. But that's after my childhood, obviously.

[dreamshark]

Yeah, clearly a related song. I think this version usually starts with "Miss Susie had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell. The steamboat went to Heaven and Susie went to ...."

I have found earlier, dirtier, versions of the Irishmen song online, but without the Hello, operator verse (which really wasn't possible before 1871 when the first telephone exchange was established). But what a boon to the innuendo song when that finally happened!

Oh wow! Once you know the first line you can find all kinds of versions online. Here's a nifty modern version (traditional beginning but updated to include a television reference) performed as hand-clapping game. I think it's so cool that even in the modern world these old child traditions persist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T_HYbva-HQ

[carbonel]

I grew up with a variation on that, but the tune was what I think of as the classic snake charming/belly dance tune.

My version has clearly been subject to the folk process, because I can find the first couple of lines ("There's a place on Mars, where the women smoke cigars"), but it quickly diverges from anything similar I can find.

[dreamshark]

I'm not sure where or when I learned "Miss Susie" but I just realized that the tune I know for it is the same as "Father's Whiskers" (which you may actually know, given your taste in music).

[adrian_turtle]

"please return my dime" looks like a 20th century addition. The insult in the first line was rude but comprehensible in the 1970s in the midwestern US. I suspect todays kids would just find it baffling.

We did a version of the song other comments call "Miss Susie," only we called it "Miss Lucy." Ours didn't mention a dime. "Behind Miss Lucy's icebox" was sometimes "behind the frigerator," though it doesn't scan quite as well.

Miss Lucy had a baby, she called it Tiny Tim
She put it in the bathtub, to see it he could swim!

Miss Lucy called the doctor, the doctor called the nurse,
The baby called the lady with the alligator purse!

Hello operator, please give me number nine
And if you disconnect me then I'll just kick your...

Behind Miss Lucy's icebox, there is a piece of glass
Miss Lucy sat upon it and she broke her little...

Ask me no more questions, I'll tell you no more lies
Miss Lucy told me all of this the day before...

She dyed her hair all purple, she dyed her hair all pink,
She dyed her all all polka-dot and flushed it down the sink

[eileenlufkin]

Probably "Do your ears hang low?"

[dreamshark]

My fondest memory of that song was years ago at Univac when Rob, a colleague about my age, started singing "Do your ears hang low?" and an older guy (WWII veteran age) stared at him in disbelief and said, "Ears??!!" That's when it suddenly hit me that the version Rob and I learned as kids had been, um, cleaned up.

[eileenlufkin]

Cool! I knew that, but I just read it somewhere; I didn't get that personal incident of realization.

london bridge

[brikbrik]

london bridge was built in the early 1200's, it could have been falling down anytime from 1400's on