What’s the origin of this playground rhyme / song? It’s set to the archetypal “snake charmer” music, the words I remember were:
In the land of Mars,
Where the ladies smoke cigars,
Every puff they take
Is enough to kill a snake.
When the snakes are dead,
They put diamonds in their heads.
When the diamonds break,
It is 1968."
But I know there must be at least a dozen variations on the lyrics. We used to sing / “chant” this during my Kindergarten years, I know that my older siblings did too. But where did it come from? When did it originate? And do adolescent kids still “sing” it?
They’re hermetic secrets in the oral tradition, and when recited under the proper circumstances (generally involving pulverized seeds bearing lysergic acid amide) they amount to a form of Time Travel for Pedestrians.
A cryptic exposition on this method was published under a weak pseudonym (as a logical derivation from semi-secret radiant field theory) by Michael Faraday, in 1972.
There’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance,
with their long blonde hair and their boobs in the air.
There’s a hole in the wall where the men can see it all,
and they all play drums on the naked ladies’ bums.
“In the land of Oz,
Where the ladies smoke cigars,
Every puff they take
Is enough to kill a snake.
When the snakes are dead,
They put roses in their heads.
When the roses die,
They put diamonds in their eyes.
When the diamonds break,
It is 1978.”
I’ve often wondered, in general, who the original authors were of all those bawdy song parodies that get handed down to one generation of kids to another. I can remember a number of them from my childhood (about 3rd through 5th grade were sort of the prime years I remember for downloading and passing on these dimly understood dirty songs). They all had to have had original authors somewhere, but who were these unheralded kid geniuses? They’ve achieved a strange sort of immortality. They deserve some kind of recognition. I wonder if any of them saw their compositions achieve success and longevity and then tried to claim credit.
"I was the one who wrote the “Ta ra ra boom dee ay, I met a girl today’ song”
“Yeah, right.”
“Seriously, I did. I was like eleven. Buena Vista Elementary School in Alamagordo, New Mexico, 1959.”
“Uh huh.”
There’s a place in France when the naked ladies dance
and a hole in the wall where the boys can see it all
and the guards don’t care – they just chew their underwear
and the king and queen have a rubber ding-a-ling
This was in elementary school, so it was the mid-to-late 1980s.
Something that I consider odd in retrospect is that when I was a child in the early '60s we were still singing songs that were obviously current twenty years earlier, all about Hitler and Germans. We had the familiar parody of “Whistle While You Work,” of course, as well as stuff like:
(to the tune of “Assembly”) There’s a German in the grass
With a bullet in his ass
Pull it out, pull it out
Like a good girl scout!
and
Tramp, tramp, tramp the boys are marching!
Here comes Hitler at the door!
If I only had the chance
I would kick him in the pants
Then there wouldn’t be a Hitler anymore!
