Danish "bouncing" song

Factual Questions
1

A friend of mine is looking for help with a Danish song that has been passed down in her husband’s family. They have the words memorized but no one knows the meaning. This is her description of the song:

He sits with the kids stradled on his lap facing him and holding their hands. As he sings the song he kind of rocks them backwards. Then at one point he lowers them very low (a back bend).

My version of his words…

Sower dough
De fear dough
De fear skelly …dough
yente eh
yente …
yente foota foughta may
yente foota lowman (where they go way back)

(With apologies for the undoubtedly awful transliteration)

Can anyone help? She’s looking for the correct words in Danish, as well as an English translation.

2

:smiley: I am danish and I’m sitting here in my office giggling trying to imagine what those words are supposed to be, perhaps if I could actually hear it I might be able to identify it.

The only song I can remember that involves bouncing on a knee is “Ride ride ranke” which goes like this:

http://www.ugle.dk/ride_ride_ranke.html
(there are probably lots of variants)

3

Hmm. The first line obviously is Sover du? = Are you sleeping?. yente could be jente = (little) girl, although that sounds more Norwegian. The Danish word for girl is pige.

4

ahhh…

Mester Jakob

You can find the lyrics for it in a lot of languages here:

http://ingeb.org/Lieder/bruderja.html

The danish version means:

Mester Jakob, Mester Jakob
Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping?
Don’t you hear the bells?
Bim, bam, bum, bim, bam, bum. (bell sound)

5

Thanks! I’m sure that will help. Does anybody know the same version?

6

Sounds like Frere Jacques.

7

Thanks Helena!

I’m the friend!

I’m pretty sure it is not any of these songs. I vaguely recall something about pennies and “penny for _____ who lives down the lane.”

Does that help any?

8

Checked with a friend who suggests it might be a Jutland dialect, southern or mid-western.
We agree that the first bit is clearly “sover du”, and we think we maybe pieced together some more words.

fear skelly =? forskellig = different

yente eh yente =? en til og en til = one more and one more
(suits for bouncing, “again, again!”)

may = mig = me (fairly obvious)

9

The little boy who lives down the lane?
Thats baa-baa-black sheep, “one for the master, one for the dame, and one for the little boy who lives down the lane”.

10

I was thinking maybe that was it Iteki, but then decided it wasn’t. It definitley has different “music”, but figured that a lot of things may have different tunes when going from country to country.

The thing that got me was that according to DH’s translation it is pennies and the living down the lane line is next to last, not last.

I sure appreciate your helping me you all. I’m putting my kids “heritage” in a scrapbook and this means a lot to me.