At least that’s the impression I got when me and some co-workers were reminiscing about these things. Everyone was familiar with the diarrhea (cha cha cha) song and were comparing verses-- my favorites:
Gotta run run real fast
'Cause it’s dripping out your ass
No pain, no strain
Just let it drain
Also, Miss Lucy and her steamboat had a different variation for each person. The one I remember:
Miss Lucy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell
Miss Lucy went to heaven, the steamboat whent to
Hello operator, please give me number nine
and if you disconnect me, I’ll kick you in your
Behind the 'frigerator there was a piece of glass
Miss Lucy went to pick it up and cut her little
Ask me no more questions, I’ll tell you no more lies
A man got hit with a bowl of shit right between the
Ikie and Mikey were playing in a ditch
Ikie told Mikey, "You big fat son-of-a-
b-i-t-c, b-i-t-c, b-i-t-c-- bitch!
Well, that’s were me and my co-workers sort of parted company. They do not remember Miss Lucy’s song being quite so foul-mouthed. Boy, when I was in grade school we had a bunch of foul-mouthed ‘diss’ songs. My favorite:
I hate to talk about your momma
But she’s in my class.
She’s got popcorn titties
And a rubber ass.
She’s 99
She’s Frankenstein
She’s the fattest motherfucker on the welfare line.
We also corrupted regular songs. Like this one sung to the tune of She’ll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain.
She was coming 'round the mountain doing 90
When the chain on her motorcycle broke (it broke!)
She was found in the grass
With the kickstand up her ass
And her titties playing Dixie on the spokes!
Don’t get me started on Barnicle Bill the Sailor. That one was triple X rated.
How 'bout you guys? Did you all get vulgar in the schoolyard? What did you sing when no grown-ups were around?
Ahh…such wonderfull memories. My Miss Lucy was sang a bit different.
The difference starting here:
Behind the 'frigerator there was a piece of glass
Miss Lucy fell upon it and cut here 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 meadow, the bees are in the park
Miss Lucy and her boyfriend are kissing in the dark.
And the diarrhea songs we sang went more like:
When you’re sliding into home and you feel something foam.
When you’re climbing up the ladder and you feel something splatter.
Only in New York would anyone think they were the only kids in the country who sang filthy lyrics at recess. :dubious:
That goes back to at least 1932, when the Washboard Rhythm Kings made a record of it (without the cusswords, just a long razzberry from the horn section). And probably way, way earlier.
I spent the first 6 years of my life in the South Bronx in the early 1970s. My memories of this time period are relatively few, but vivid, and include being evacuated from my day care facility because the (abandoned) apartment building next door was burning down; empty lots filled with rubble, weeds and broken bottles (and probably worse); looking out of my apartment window into an empty lot next door; and playing with cockroaches in my bathtub.
Also how perfectly normal all these things seemed to me at the time. There is no tinge of horror, sadness or anything negative in these memories, it’s just the way the world was.
My family moved to Queens when I was 6 and I remember all these rhymes as well. I doubt NYC has a monopoly on rude children’s rhymes, songs and chants, but a few I assume were local, such as one loosely to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, sung against some group arrayed in opposition (boys vs. girls, team vs. team, etc.) that referenced a bridge between Queens and The Bronx:
*We’d like <group X> with a rope around their necks,
A knife in their backs and a bullet in their heads
We like <group X> with a rope around their necks,
Hanging from the Whitestone Bridge
Cut the rope! Drop dead! What the hell do we care?
You don’t wear no underwear!
You should see what’s under there!*
Rather chilling in retrospect, given that we were pre-teens, except for the last 2 lines which are more typically childish. And I suppose this song/rhyme probably exists in other places, referencing other local bridges or escarpments suitable for a lynching.
It’s not that I think NYC is special. All of my co-workers are from around here. It was just that, when I sang the “Hate to talk about your momma” song, they were all pretty aghast.
I just remembered something else funny (in retrospect) about that: there were several kids who would cheerfully and loudly sing along to the earlier verses about knifing, shooting and hanging someone, but balk at saying “hell” and instead would sing “what the heck do we care”.
Hey, I just remembered another version of Miss Lucy.
Ikie and Mikey were playing in a ditch
Ikie told Mikey you big fat son of a
Bring down your children, don’t let them play with sticks
'Cause when they get older they’ll learn to play with
Dickie had a son, he named him Tiny Tim
He put him in a bathtub to teach him how to swim
So he swam to the bottom, he swam to the top
And when he swam around his father caught his
Cocktail, ginger ale two cents a glass. . .
In elementary school in central New Jersey, 1971-1976, a popular one on the playgrounds went:
Boomchucka Willie from the bubble lagoon
He’s a mean motherfucker, you can tell by his clothes…"
And gets more obscene from there.
Upon thinking about it, I thought it odd that what seemed like a version of “The Signifying Monkey” turned up in whitebread suburbia. A Googleization has just informed me that a version that begins “Up jumped a monkey from the Coconut Grove” (but is otherwise the same) is a well-known running cadence in the military, or was in the Vietnam era anyway. So there you go.
… Dark is like a movie, a movie’s like a show,
A show is like a program, and this is what I know
I know, I know my mother,
I know, I know my pa,
I know, I know my sister with the 80-DD bra.
I can’t remember what came after that, if anything.
Some others:
Deck the halls with gasoline,
Spray them down with kerosene,
See the school burn down to ashes,
Aren’t you glad you played with matches?
Hello mother, hello father,
I’ve been smoking marijuana,
Coke is good here, crack is better,
I’m so plastered I can hardly write this letter.
I can’t find my missing drugs,
I think that they’ve been eaten by the bugs,
All the bugs, they are so high now
They don’t even need to lose their wings to fly now.
They have caught me, I’m in jail
Please send my crack and my bail.
For a toilet we use a pail,
Please send my heroin air-mail.
Abraham Lincoln was a fine old man
He washed his hair in a frying pan [not sure about this line]
He jumped out the window with his dick in his hand
and shouted “Hey, motherfucker, I’m Superman!”
Admittedly, the mental image of the Great Emancipator acting so obscenely is pretty hilarious.
Another one, more violent, sung to the tune of “You’re in the Army Now”:
1984,
My teacher went to the war
She sat on the grass
She burned her ass
That was the end of the war.
My kids’ friends had a version of Diarrhea where you had to do the rhyme with the last car you passed, i.e. “When you’re in a Mitsubishi and you feel something sqhishy…” (That’s the only one I remember)
Nastiest song I heard as a kid, probably about 7th grade, rural Oklahoma, and this kid with a sailor uncle knew all the words to various stanzas of “Walking Down Canal Street”
Dare I quote it? Could it possibly be copyrighted?
“Walking down Canal Street, knock on every door,
Goddamn son of a bitch, couldn’t find a whore”
Found a whore, couldn’t get it in, couldn’t get it out
“When I finally got it out, it was red and sore
So the moral of my story is, never fuck a whore.”
I was 12. This scandalized me. And yet…I memorized the lyrics.
