There are several verses you can sing to the childrens' favorite Skip to My Lou, that can be found in different books and on different websites. I grew up singing ‘Lost my partner, what’ll I do’, ‘I’ll get another one prettier than you’, ‘Flies in the buttermilk shoo-fly shoo’. I chose for our recording to sing the verses about the flies in the buttermilk, the cow’s in the cornfield, and the little red wagon painted blue for three reasons: kids love to sing about bugs and animals and things they know; as a kid I never really loved the lyrics about getting a partner prettier than you, and the picture of the little red wagon painted blue fills me with joy!
According to American Favorite Ballads, Tunes and Songs as Sung by Pete Seeger, Oak Publications: ‘Young people in many a 19th century midwestern community were not allowed to dance. It was sinful, said the adults. The youths asked, “Is it alright if we play some games?” Thus evolved the American invention known as the play party: a square dance or ring dance accompanied not by instruments, but by handclapping and singing – and called a “play party”, NOT a dance. “Skip to my Lou” was always a favorite. ‘
And from the Folk Songs of North America, by Alan Lomax, Doubleday: ‘"Skip to My Lou" is a simple game of stealing partners. It begins with any number of couples hand in hand, skipping around in a ring....It's an ice-breaker, a good dance to get a group acquainted to one another and to get everyone in the mood for swinging around.
It's interesting to note that 'loo' is the Scottish word for "love." The spelling change from "loo" to "lou" probably happened as our Anglo ancestors, and the song, became Americanized.’
Lastly, according to Folk Songs of the United States, from the California State series published in 1960, which took the words and melody of Skip to My Lou from The American Singer, Book II, copyright 1944, Skip to my Lou is a ‘Folk Song from Tennessee’.
We have taken the song in our hearts and in arrangement to Louisiana, and Rob and his accordion also share their love of Northern Brazil.
Crawdad is a variant of an older piece named Sweet Thing, which was born in the levee camps and jook joints of the African-American South, and is the kind of tune designed to accompany a sort of dance called a 'play party'. In the first hundred years or so of our nation's history, many communities permitted play parties as a function of social interaction. Square dancing was frowned upon but permitted, and 'round dancing' where couples danced face to face with arms around each other was something no respectable country girl would do. Play party melodies are characteristically simple and lilting, and the words are often improvised responses to the experiences of working, courting, and living. Many, many songs in North American folk music have their roots in the play party tradition. When you hear a group of children singing and chanting jump rope rhymes in the school yard, you are listening to an example of a modern play party.
Source: Folk Song USA, Alan Lomax, Editor, New American Library.
New lyrics, friendly to all people of all ages and places with a kid familiar theme, to the tune of the original Tin Pan Alley song by Harry Warren and Mort Dixon, Nagasaki, written in 1928.
4. On Top of Spaghetti
A favorite from my childhood, from many childhoods, and I apologise ahead of time if your children drive you crazy with it in the car as we did with it to our parents. When we rehearsed this song, at one point we were taking a little break and joking about something, and when we played it again I spontaneously did something ridiculous at the end. We could not stop laughing! I didn't 'plan' to go and record it that way.... then, when we went to record Spaghetti, we had started playing and that silly joke popped into my head again, like a mischievous child grinning straight at me and I thought- could I surprise Will (who was special guest accordionist on this song and on Four in a Boat) by doing that again? And I did. It was tons of fun!
Folk singer and composer Tom Glaser is credited as the author of this song, which contains new lyrics to the old American song 'On Top of Old Smokey'; kids love this song. You get to sing about sneezing on your spaghetti and seeing meatballs roll around on the floor and then out the door and under a bush and turn into mush and later a magical meatball tree... great!
I have found online the story of a man who remembers coming up with the new lyrics to the tune with several other kids in Boy Scout camp some years before Tom Glaser published the song. Here are links to the history of the original song, the history of the new song and to the former Boy Scout's history of the new song.
The Wikipedia entry spells the song wrong (it is Smokey, not Smoky), but it has the most seemingly correct information in one place and so I include it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Top_of_Old_Smoky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Top_of_Spaghetti
http://ontopofspaghetti.org/ Philip Jackie Jackman
5. The Riddle Song
The origins of this song stretch back centuries; people have been singing this love song for countless generations. My Mom used to sing this song to us when we were little, and I used to sing it to our child when she was itty bitty. Enjoy.
Here is a very detailed history of the Riddle Song, by Erin Sheriff
http://ket.oake.org/sum09song.htm
6. There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea
7. Shake it, Baby, Shake it
8. Buffalo Gals/Red Haired Boy
9. Four in a Boat
10. Jambalaya