Dramatic pause while Henry’s lone brain cell ponders this.
There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear liza.
There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hooooooooooole!
(background chuckles merging into light applause)
A straw? A knife??? It’s a stick and an axe! Even the version on Seseme street 18 or 20 years ago said stick and axe. This is the first half of the version I know http://morbid-dlite.diaryland.com/010504_13.html
However, doing a search I’ve seen : straw-knife, straw-axe, twig-axe, and stick-axe. Why on earth would anyone be so heavy handed as to use an axe to cut a straw? And I’ve even seen varations on the name, Georgie instead of Henry.
I beleive I once saw Harry Belefonte do this song–perhaps with Carol Burnett? I can see him wearing a straw hat and ragged pants, barefoot, passing the bucket back and forth to Carol, or whoever he was singing with. Strange amount of detail for something I only saw once. One of those childhood memories of watching television that comes back to haunt you.
Oh, I get it.
I was about to draft an indignant post about how you can’t fix bucketholes with sticks, but I just figured it out. Just in time, luckily. Maybe I should post about this to the Eureka thread.