Well, Suzy can go to hello operator for all I care.
Ha, ha!
Lucy was an entrepreneur with a vast shipping empire. Suzy was just some insane child welfare case who tried to drown her newborn.
I’m in the midwest, and I learnt it as Suzy.
Checking my sources again. Iona Opie is a goddess. Page 472, same source, regarding the baby, bathtub, and soap version (“Miss Lucy had a baby…”):
“This saga is constructed, like a caddis-worm case, from odds and ends stuck together… The first eight lines can be recognized as part of a bawdy song about a whore called Lulu, who had a baby which 'was an awful shock, She couldn’t call it Lulu ’cos, The bastard had a cock.”
She doesn’t mention the steamboat rhyme, but she was British and that one may not have been transatlantic.
Miss Molly had the steamboat. (The steamboat had a bell.)
I’m in the midwest, too, I’ve never heard it with any other name.
Nope, I’m a girl… but growing up with 2 brothers, you’re right… they don’t play those types of games. Barbie only got drug out when GI Joe needed a prisoner to torture.
Cropper and Dunn were so YOUNG! (researching) No, I guess they were both 22, but they look 15.
I grew up in the Midwest (St. Louis), and it was definitely Miss Lucy there. Also, I didn’t know Mary Mack until I learned it from my son a couple of years ago (when he was 6ish). In the schoolyards in the DC area, Mary’s buttons are definitely silver.
I don’t think I ever saw anyone slap-clapping to it, but it was popular for jumprope. And I can’t swear to it being purple buttons rather than silver: Either sounds right.
Growing up in Cleveland, it was always Suzy who had the steamboat, not Lucy. And as for the Mary Mac I’m marrying, in the versions I’ve heard it’s always the fathers who are making the marriage happen, not the mothers (though mother is more alliterative).
Growing up in NH, I learned it was Miss Suzy who had the steamboat. I was quite sure I’d learned the rhyme from Edith Fowke’s Sally Go 'Round the Sun but it doesn’t seem to be listed there. Dr. Drake, what’s the Iona Opie? Sounds interesting.
My childhood aussie version:
Cinderella, dressed in yella
Went downstairs to kiss a fella
On the way her panties busted
How many people where disgusted
1,2 etc…
You can see the first cite of the counting rhyme(in the U.S) that I could find(1887) using Google Books.
It’s rhyme #795, contributed by a person from West Chester, Pa. and says–
I know a piece of that as another jumping rhyme:
*
I like coffee, I like tea,
I like the boys and the boys like me.
Yes, no, maybe so,
Yes, no, maybe so *(ad infinitum)
I learned I like a colored boy and he likes me. I’m guessing that wouldn’t be in a book written in 1887, though.
Oops, meant to quote sam.
Iona Opie was the foremost scholar of children’s folklore, ever, though she mostly did British stuff. Her books are a great source of scholarly information on the origin of and variation among these rhymes. I am constantly referring to The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren and The Singing Game. My favorite is The People of the Playground (she calls children “people” because that’s what they call themselves). Edith Fowke was a Canadian folklorist. Brian Sutton-Smith is another name to conjure with in the narrow field of jump-rope & hand-clapping rhymes.
Most of the tunes have similar melodies, barely any narrative, and circulate entirely within oral tradition. For that reason, it’s really common for one song to borrow characters, lines, or entire verses from another song.
samclem, thanks for that reference: I don’t have that in my collection. Must hoard.
My Miss Mary Mack was a lot more mysterious:
Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack
All dressed in black black black
With silver buttons buttons buttons
All down her back back back.
She went upstairs stairs stairs
To comb her hair hair hair
And never came back back back.
I always wondered about the lady with the alligator purse, though. She was like a demi-goddess in these kinds of rhymes. (My mother called the doctor. My father called the nurse. My sister called the lady with the alligator purse.)
This is the version I learned, but I don’t remember those last two lines. I can’t remember if we stopped before them, or if we said something else. I was beginning to think that the version I learned had conflated two different rhymes.
Child of the mid-Atlantic, here.
Mary Mack had silver buttons (buttons, buttons) down her back, and she hit up her mother for half a buck to see the elephants jump the fence.
Miss Lucy was the proprietress of the steamboat. Sometimes she had a baby instead.
Do tell?
Silver buttons, boys climbing fences/dropping pants (depending on whether grownups were around, I suppose) and I can definitely remember all the clapping motions to that one.
As a refined young lady, I know it was “my dolly has the flu, she might throw up on you.”
Here in northern California, Mary Mack was off to see the elephants jumping the fence, and Miss Suzy had the steamboat, which had a bell (dingding). I never heard it as Miss Lucy, ever.