Mid 1980s for me.
My mother was a nursery school teacher and my father was in the folk music scene so we got a lot of this growing up. School was big on music too. Now I have a two year old and sometimes I find that we’ve passed more than an hour on the swing with me singing without repeating.
Some others songs I haven’t seen mentioned yet:
The chivalrous shark (a little sexist, but still funny)
Froggy went a’courtin (we have a chorus that appears to be idiosyncratic to my family)
When the great ship went down
This land is your land
Voi Che Sapete (middle school chorus)
Polly wolly doodle
Oh Susanna
Bluebird bluebird
Country roads
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Another Brick in the Wall - Part 2.
Well, I did, anyway.
It wasn’t until my 20s, I think, that I finally figured out the name to this song. I remember it clearly from Tom and Jerry, but could never understand any of the words, except for what sounded like “crambone!” I always called it by that name. Apparently, it wasn’t just me.
…sword and p-p-p-p-p-p-p revolver by his side, crambone!
Up With People: Man the nuns just thought was greatest thing ever and we even learned some choreography to go with it. I hated it even then.
The Ballad of the Green Berets: Again some serious nun-love going on with the war still in full swing.
^ Everything is Beautiful by Ray Stevens.
Thanks for making me remember that.
Christopher Columbus
What do you think of that?
A big fat lady
Sat upon my hat.
My hat she broke,
Oh, what a joke.
My hat she broke,
Oh, what a Jooooooooke…
Christopher Columbus
What do you think of that?
In class in the third grade.
Remember off the top of my head…
Down by the Bay
The Canadian version of This Land is Your Land (‘This land is your land, this land is my land, from Bonavista, to Vancouver Island/From the Arctic Circle, to the Great Lakes waters’)
An a capella version of Heart and Soul.
A French version of the Banana Boat Song. I wish I could remember the lyrics to that one…
On the ‘yeah, it was a few decades ago’ front, What You Gonna Do When the Rent Comes 'Round?
I recall singing “Bingo” with the claps and the adding/dropping of letters, too.
We also sang:
America the Beautiful
My Country 'Tis of Thee
This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land (American version, of course)
And we also used to sing:
There’s a Hole in my bucket
Dear Liza, Dear Liza
There’s a Hole in my bucket
Dear Liza, a hole
And then there would be a whole bunch of verses with Liza telling Henry how to fix it, and him sounding like a moron.
I also remember a song from the old Captain Kangaroo Show that was one of those building songs about a tree with a branch and a twig and a leaf and a nest and a bird, “and the green grass grew all around, all around, and the green grass grew all around”.
Glory, glory hallelujah–
Teacher hit me with a ruler
So I bopped her on the bean
With a rotten tangerine
And boy did she turn green
Our variant would likely scramble a swat team today…
*Glory, glory hallelujah–
Teacher hit me with a ruler
So i met her at the door
with a Colt .44
And she won’t do that anymore.
*
Fifty Nifty United States. We had to memorize it. It’s actually come in handy a few times.
There are only a few songs I specifically remember singing in school (although there must have been others).
“America”
“As the Caissons Go Rolling Along”
Sister Joan (6th grade, I think) had us do “Row Row Row Your Boat” as a round. Then she taught us “The Orchestra Song” which starts “The violin singing with lovely ringing” (there are slightly different versions).
My 4-5th grade teacher had a piano in class and every morning we’d learn and sing American patriotic songs. The ONLY classroom in the whole school to do this. Songs included:
The Star-Spangled Banner
America the Beautiful
My Country, ‘Tis of Thee
Marines’ Hymn
This Land Is Your Land
etc.
Funiculì, Funiculà.
“Ra-rakatum,” or something similar. Google’s got nuthin’ so I’m probably spelling it wrong. Anyone know it?
We had to learn and sing these and other songs in elementary school. It would be very cool to discover that they were taken from the same source material (teacher’s book).
Down by the station
Early in the morning
See the little pufferbellies
All in a row
See the station master
Turn the little handle
Chug chug puff puff
Off they go
My hat, it has three corners.
Three corners has my hat.
And had it not three corners.
It would not be my hat!
Father Abraham had many sons
Many sons had Father Abraham
You were one of them
And so was I
So let’s just praise the Lord!
(Christian school)
I hated to sing Father Abraham because in between verses the teacher would call out, left hand! or whatever and then you were supposed to flap your left hand while you sang the next verse. All the “dance moves” were cumulative so after we sang the damn thing like six times we’d all be flailing around like idiots. Teachers loved the song, probably believing that it wore us little brats out.
Here comes teacher, floatin’ down the Delaware
Chewin’ on her underwear, couldn’t find another pair
Ten days later, eaten by a polar bear
That’s why the polar bear died!
We used to sing a song about the Titanic. “Oh they built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue…”