I am seeing an uptick in the number of articles the Interwebs has to offer on the True Story Behind various works of literature, and it is obviously time to take advantage of the trend. I shall therefore indulge in a pastime which has obsessed people since the early nineteenth century, and enlighten you with the True Story Behind Common Nursery Rhymes. As with any other True Stories you find on the Interwebs any actual facts which creep into these accounts are purely coincidental.
It is now largely forgotten that one nursery rhyme you probably partially recall was not a poem for children but a recipe for fish stew. Mary, Mary Quite Contrary grows her garden with “cockle shells” (the shells of scallops) and “Pretty Maids All in a Row” (Fair Maids is a term used in parts of England for pilchards, or sardines.) Reputable scholars (putting in their names would just weigh the article down) suggest the “Silver Bells” are either lilies of the valley tossed in for flavoring, or the recommendation of a song to sing to time the cooking process.
Polly, Put the Kettle On was originally a scathing satire on a buxom coffee shop owner in eighteenth century London, who lured in customers with her abundant charm but wasn’t much of a cook. The ORIGINAL text was “Polly put the coffee on. Polly put the coffee on. Polly put the coffee on. Let’s all have tea.”
Where Have You Been, Billy Boy Billy Boy is a summary of a dark Australian detective novel about private eye William “Billy Boy” Billabong, who is working a missing children case and traces it to an apparently charming femme fatale whose crimes against children are revealed in a devastating final chapter (You will never sing the lines “Can she bake a cherub pie?” quite the same way again.)
Mary Had a Little Lamb is actually an ancient verse from a Renaissance elementary textbook, in which rhymes were written to help students learn proper spelling. Mary represented the letter Q, and the poem helped children remember that in writing, Q must always be followed by a little ewe.
Sing a Song of Sixpence was a protest by the old-fashioned against clock adjustment. The four and twenty blackbirds represent the hours in a day, which are disarranged when Daylight Savings Time comes along. So the king and queen were at work or having tea when they should have been eating the amazing pie, and the maid, representing the working classes, was the one most damaged.
Here We Go Looby Loo was originally a drinking song. “All on a Saturday night”, each of “we” becomes a looby (a synonym for “doofus”). I have been trying to establish that this was an inspiration for the Bay City Rollers song “Saturday Night”, but, as it happens, more people on the Interwebs remember Looby Loo than the old pop rock single, which turned fifty this year. (Just looking up “Bay City Rollers” probably made the algorithm label me as some kind of OLD person.)
There is more to the world of nursery rhymes (I could fill a couple of blogs with the True Story of “Eeny Meeney Miney Moe”) but this will do to go on. When you inevitably pass along some of these stories, please remember to leave out my name. There are nosy people out there who seem to resent the creativity some of us put into our True Facts.
Blogsy Babbles 