“Ri-ise
and shi-ine
and give god
your glory glory” (repeat)
Have I got it right?
This.
The Farmer in the Dell (that poor little lonely cheese.)
There Was an Old Lady (who swallowed a fly)
I’m Being Eaten by a Boa Constrictor
The Head Bone’s Connected to the…
There are more just on the tip of my tongue…
Also, this was later in high school but we were taught a song in Spanish called Los Cuatro Muleros (four mule boys) and the lyrics translated to:
"Of the four mule boys
Who are going to the river
The one on the dapple-grey mule is my husband
Oh, my mistake!
It’s my brother-in-law."
I still get a kick out of that. It is so pointless. I wonder if I’m missing context (other than the obvious.)
“Dad, the heathen’s getting away!”
Green Grow the Rashes
The Rattlin’ Bog
Chad Gadya
Fifty Nifty United States (Very useful, as it teaches all 50 states in alphabetical order which helped me so much in Social Studies.)
Senor Don Gato
On the Dummy Line (I think it was a hobo song, and the lyrics, in retrospect, were really…questionable.) I just looked up the lyrics and the ones I see are different from the ones we learned, which were about train guards throwing people onto the track or hitting them with two by fours.
Bobby Shaftoe
Shenandoah
Like Dendarii_Dame, I also recall the joys of singing all of the names of the states in alphabetical order. I never really gave too much thought as to what it might actually be titled, so that was kind of fun to learn. I just typed it into one of those lyrics websites and discovered that I had forgotten half the song. I only remembered the part with all of the states and the part at the end, where you dramatically sing that “(name of your state) is the best.” And the cherry on top is finding out that it was written by Ray Charles – no, not HIM – who also happened to be one of the singers of the theme to Three’s Company.
How about “Rubin and Rachel” where the boys and girls contemplate expulsion of the other gender to an icy death.
Oh yes, “There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza dear Liza”
In our class the boys sung the male part and the girls sang the female part. It seemed to take FOREVER.
Rural New England elementary school in the 1960s -
we were taught to sing “Man Smart, Woman Smarter”
Fifty years later, it’s the only thing I learned at age 5 that has stuck like that, and has been - quite useful at times, I can go through the list super-fast. Only problem is I have to start at the beginning every time to get to a particular state, and always drag out O–hiiii—o in my head whenever that state comes up.
I went to Catholic grade school, so lots of Catholic songs at Mass.
I remember us singing Do-Re-Mi from The Sound of Music. At the time I didn’t know anything about the film. I thought it was just a song.
I thought the same thing when my class sang it.
Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam (clue: he doesn’t). We felt embarrassed by this nonsense even at the time.
When I was in elementary school - roughly 1957 to 1964 - we had an assembly every Friday afternoon. We sang songs from old songbooks called The New Blue Book of Favorite Songs. Our teachers were especially fond of the songs of Stephen Foster, who despite his many ditties about the Old South, was a native Pennsylvanian. We sang many of his songs. The songbooks had the original words in dialect, and that’s how we sang them. I found one of those songbooks at a yard sale a few years ago, and could hardly believe my eyes. Here’s the chorus of one of them:
Down in de corn-field
Hear dat mournful sound:
All de darkeys am a-weeping,—
Massa’s in de cold, cold ground.
And that’s just one example. Of course, I lived in all-white suburbia, and there were no Black students, but still it’s hard to believe we were still singing those tunes in 1964.
Let There Be Peace On Earth (and let it begin with meeeeeeeeee)