What about:
The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out
The worms play pinochle on your snout***
Apparently, goes back at least to the late 18th century.
*** this version is the variaton I learned.
I remember that one from the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Books. You know, the one with all the terrifying illustrations. I never heard it elsewhere, though.
I remember most of the gopher guts song except for one line…
Great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts,
Mutilated monkey meat,
Dirty little piggy feet,
Top it all off with “something something something rhyming with feet”
Whoops, I forgot my spoon.
Can any Doper supply the missing line? This is going to keep me up nights.
I don’t know, I remembered it differently.
It was something like,
Dirty little piggy feet, put them on your spoon to eat
but I just remembered a third verse to that song, which is truly inexplicable.
Nine months later she was floatin’ down the Nile river
Chewing on her underwear
Couldn’t 'ford another pair
Three weeks later she was bitten by a polar bear
That’s how the polar bear died
I almost wonder if me and my friends made that up.
No, here’s how we used to sing that verse:
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream.
Throw your teacher overboard and listen to her scream.
Six days later, find her in the Delaware,
Chewin’ on her underwear,
Waiting for another pair.
Ten days later, bitten by a polar bear.
That’s why the polar bear died.
It was a completely different song than Gopher Guts. Same melody though.
That explains it.
The version I remember began “Nobody likes me,” as in the link. That fits my vernacular better–at least, assuming it’s describing not having any friends rather than parental abandonment.
“Three large jars of all-purpose porpoise pus
to eat without a spo-o-o-on!”
No, that’s not the missing line for the song I remember. Maybe in your region, but not mine.
“So I had to use a straw!”
For reference, here it is.
Kids sang that song when I was a kid which would be in the 70s and it was old then. I am sure there’s a source at some point but it became that Children’s Oral History that just spreads and mutates. Like the aforementioned "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells… " Or “Great Big Globs of Greasy Grimey Gopher Guts…”
This kind of thing seems kind of dead now. Or at least is less organic because now kids are marketed to as much as adults so instead of passing around songs and playing, they are sold Baby Shark.
Our version was:
Nobody likes me, everybody hates me
Guess I’ll go eat worms.
Long thing slimy ones,
Short fat juicy ones,
Itsy bitsy fuzzy fuzzy worms.
And, of course:
Great big globs of greasy grimy gopher guts,
Mutilated monkey meat,
Little birdies dirty feet.
Great big globs of greasy grimy gopher guts,
And I forgot my spoon!
The Mudcat Cafe database of folk songs has:
Nobody likes me, everybody hates me,
Going to the garden, eat worms
Big ones little ones, ushy gooshy gooshy ones
Worms that like to squirm.Bite their heads off, suck their juice out
Throw their skins away.
You’d be surprised how many little worms
You can eat three times a day
which I never sang as a kid.
It’s definitely old. Newspaper writers in the early 20s were talking about it as an old nursery rhyme. A paper in 1897 relates an undoubtedly fictitious precocious child saying “nobody loves me. I guess I’ll go down in the garden and eat bugs. I ate free yes’day—two smoove ones and one woolly one,” which had mutated by the following year to being related identically, but with “bugs” changed to “worms” and no later than 1907 a familiar:
“Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going out into the garden and eat grass,” sang Alexander Pandella with Italian basso disgusto in the northern part of town late Monday evening as he closely cropped lawns in the different yards with evident relish…
If I had to guess I would put it to the 1890s, somewhere, but definitely closer to the 1860s than to the childhoods of anyone youthful enough to be on the SDMB.