What would have been the intended audience for a song like this? I assume that one would be more likely to hear it sung by a bard at a roadside tavern, rather than in a dignified noble court. But what do I know? Also, some other questions:
Were most secular (vocal) songs performed in falsetto?
What does “dildo” mean here? One contributor on Genius says that it’s a nonsense word, like “la de dee” or whatever, while another a few lines up says it’s exactly what you think it is. For whatever it’s worth, CBS Sunday Morning featured this song and its liberal use of the word “dildo” as evidence that classical music was, in part anyway, a lot bawdier than how it’s thought of now. I’ll trust the credential of the latter for more than those of the former.
Finally, a few centuries have separated the writer from this hearer (me). I’m assuming that, in its day, this song was a real knee-slapper – a dog with a hole in his head and a dildo sticking out! Who ever heard of such a thing?!? But the comedy ends after the first couple of lines, the rest is just kind-of stream-of-consciousness wordplay. Was there a whole genre of comedic (I guess) songs like this?
The Oxford English Dictionary has this definition:
INTERJECTION 1. 1590–1838
Used in songs as (part of) a refrain or other sequence of rhythmically sung syllables. Often in combination with other meaningless sounds, as la, etc. (perhaps compare instances of hey diddle, diddle at hey int. 2). Obsolete.
The earliest quotation in this sense is from 1590. The other meaning (“an object shaped like an erect penis”) has quotations from nearly the same time (earliest 1597) but the OP’s song seems to be using the meaningless interjection sense.
A dildo, you might think, is a modern contraption and a word of our times — something that sprang to life with the advent of battery-operated toys and women’s lib and all that. But you would be wrong to believe that. It was alive and healthy and serving its perky purposes way back in heady Elizabethan times, and it found its way not only into the bawdy boudoirs of the 16th century, but also into the rhyme and verse of the period’s literary and musical fare.
Hell, if you want evidence for that, we have a twerking song from the 17th century that essentially contains the lyric “face down ass up that’s the way we like to fuck”.
Just read The Canterbury Tales for many examples of how down and dirty storytelling got in the middle ages. The thing is, while the Middle Ages may have been more like now, or maybe 1990 - the present, they were followed by an era that was more like the 1950s.
The Romantic age of Jane Austen was fairly prudish, which is why so many comedies of manners came out of it. But it also rediscovered the literature of the Middle Ages, that The Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment had dismissed as too, well, basically stupid to have produced anything worthwhile (that’s a general statement-- some pieces from the late middle ages were “polished up” by Renaissance authors and remained in circulation).
What happened in the later periods was that the bawdy stuff in medieval writings was “interpreted” as standing for other things, and meaning something else from the blatant meaning. Anything to clean up the stuff, and turn medieval writers into noble savages.
But yeah, the plain, and sometimes quite disgusting, meaning is what the author intended. The Middle Ages was full of “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells,” and “Here I sit all broken-hearted…”