Clap hands, clap hands
'Til Daddy comes home
Daddy has money
And baby has none!
Nobody to whom I have ever repeated this rhyme has heard it before! Is it a Brooklyn thing? Of course, with a quick Google search, I find lots of variants on the rhyme.
Speaking of Brooklyn, there is a song that my father taught us all when we were little, Dunderbeck's Machine. It's probably a song that he learned from the Brooklyn firemen who were a big part of his childhood, or maybe from a neighbor. It is the story of a man who has created a sausage grinder and his terrible demise at the end! Again, none of my friends had ever heard it. The internet, being a wonderful thing, has revealed many variations of this grisly song. There are even videos now on Youtube! This is the closest to the song as my father taught it to us, but there are differences in melody and lyrics, as in all folk songs. Perhaps a bit more research will unearth the origins of this song, but I will teach my version to X, so he can gross out all of his friends when he's older!
Enjoy!
2 comments:
Gross. And funny. Do you get stuck on the difference between what you want X to know and hear (to protect him) and the fact that you (most likely) weren't harmed by the stuff you heard as a child, like this? I do. Not as much as I used to, but I still do.
Oh, definitely! I sing the Dunderbeck song to him, but I think I probably wouldn't want to expose him to, say, Guns N Roses -- which I listened to nonstop when I was 13, and thankfully too naive to understand fully. I listen to it now and go "OH MY GOD! No WONDER my mother repeatedly threw away my GNR tapes!!!"
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