hand-clapping games

The new Piecework came yesterday. It was the annual lace issue. I didn't have a lot of time to read it, as I was grading the "big" papers for ecology, but there was an article on Susan B. Anthony in there.

And one thing caught my eye: Apparently, she was memorialized in a jump-rope rhyme. I don't have the magazine right in front of me now to know if this is what was published, but the Susan B. Anthony Museum lists this one:

Miss Lulu had a baby, she called him tiny Tim.
She put him in the bathtub, so see if he could swim.
He drank up all the water! He ate up all the soap!
He tried to swallow the bathtub, but it wouldn’t go down his throat!!
Call for the doctor!
Call for the nurse!
Call for the lady with the alligator purse!
“Mumps!” said the doctor. “Measles!” said the nurse.
“Vote!!” said the lady with the alligator purse!!

That's interesting to me. We didn't jump rope that much when I was a kid (there were a few jump ropes and they usually wound up being "checked out" at recess time before we got to them), but we did use a lot of the jump rope rhymes as hand-clapping rhymes. (I am guessing most girls of my generation remember those hand-clapping games; for my cohort, they seemed to be most popular in 2nd and 3rd grade).

We used a variant of the one above, but I think it was either Miss Molly or Miss Lucy instead of Miss Lulu. And the lady with the alligator purse DIDN'T say "Vote!" - that would have made no sense to us; we didn't know who Susan B. Anthony was, and as far as we knew, women had ALWAYS had the vote. (We learned differently a few years later in history class).

I THINK what we said was "NOTHING" said the lady in the alligator purse but it's been a long time. (Some sources list her as saying "hiccups" but that doesn't seem right to me).

But it's interesting to me that that rhyme got passed down from perhaps as far back as the 1890s, maybe changing and mutating a bit on the way, but it still existed circa 1976. (I wonder: do kids still do hand-clapping games today? Or still use jump-rope rhymes?)

We also used another "Miss Somebody" rhyme:

Miss Molly had a steamboat
The steamboat had a bell
Miss Molly went to Heaven
The steamboat went to....
Hello, operator!
Please give me number nine
And if you disconnect me,
I'll paddle your.....
Behind the refrigerator
There was a piece of glass
Miss Molly sat upon it
And cut her little...
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 city,
Bees are in the park
Miss Molly and her boyfriend
are kissing in the d-a-r-k, d-a-r-k, dark

(*I think we used to say "pulling wings off"....we didn't really know at that time that the zipper on boy's pants was called a fly).

This is one of those "I'm gonna say a naughty word!" songs that then turns and allows for the naughty word to become something innocent. (A more famous example is the "Shaving Cream Song" that Dr. Demento used to play - you would think the guy was going to refer to another substance that started with sh- but he would say "shaving cream" instead.)

There are other variants of this rhyme but that's the one I remember.

We had other ones, I remember "Playmate, come out and play with me" which I guess was actually a child's song from the 1930s or thereabouts (Again: how did we learn these kinds of things? What kind of cultural osmosis was going on? Old Bugs Bunny cartoons? Seeing Shirley Temple movies at the revival house? Grandparents?)

There was also a song called La Paloma, which, I don't remember now if we learned it in grade-school music class or if some folkie like John Denver sang it, but somehow we turned it into a hand-clapping rhyme too. I don't remember how it went, I just remember the title.

We did once in a while get a jump rope - the big long kind, where two people turned it and one (or sometimes more) people could jump. The two rhymes I remember using with those were "Teddy bear, Teddy bear" (where you pantomimed the actions - going up stairs, saying your prayers - as you jumped) and Cinderella:

Cinderella
Dressed in yella'
Went upstairs
To see her fella'
How many kisses did he give her?
1, 2, 3, 4....


(And the idea was, you counted as high as you could before you missed a step and then it was the next person's turn)

Again, I wonder - do kids still do that kind of thing, or has the cultural transmission (however it worked) been broken? Or have these simple games been replaced by other things?