1998 20.3

Nancy McCabe
Glory, Glory Hallelujah, Teacher Hit Me With a Ruler: Gender and Violence in Subversive Children’s Songs

On the school bus in the lower grades, I learned dozens of subversive songs that I sang with unusual relish for a quiet, rule-abiding child: morbid and disgusting ones about gopher guts, about worms that play pinochle on the toes of corpses, and about "my dead dog Rover that I overran with the mower." I sang songs full of titillating references to underwear and toilets, especially amused by the idea of flushing people down them. I learned songs with references to current politics: in the early ’70s, we sang about Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Agnew, and Nixon. I learned songs in which taboo words like hell were narrowly avoided, as well as parodies of hymns, Christmas carols, TV theme songs, and commercial jingles. Our bus driver censored some references, insisting, for instance, that we sing about one hundred bottles of milk on the wall. While kids like my friend Kay, a fellow Kansan, sang

Marijuana, marijuana, LSD, LSD.
Scientists make it, teachers take it.
Why can’t we? Why can’t we?
we obeyed the bus driver with
Marijuana, marijuana, LSD, LSD.
We can do without it, we can do without it.
Why can’t they? Why can’t they?
But while the bus driver would not allow celebrations of substance abuse, she showed no similar objections to violence. And my favorites were the violent ones, those documenting the gruesome demises of a range of characters: Deadeye, the Western Cowboy who had a very shiny gun; We three kings of Orient Are, who tried to smoke a rubber cigar; My Bonnie who had tuberculosis; Alice, with legs like toothpicks and a neck like a giraffe. And I took even more delight in the violent anti-school songs in which female teachers met horrible fates—particularly odd considering how much I loved school. In fact, I remember more of those songs in their entirety than did most of the fifty people between ages 9 and 59 from fourteen states who responded to an informal survey I conducted during the summer of 1997.

Several folklorists have attempted to account for the appeal of these songs to a wide range of children. Spreading almost exclusively orally between children across generations and geography, picking up references to current politics and popular culture, mutating into ever-changing versions that retain core lines and ideas, the songs provide outlets for play with language and forbidden subjects. According to Mary and Herbert Knapp, the songs offer "an informal safety valve for children’s resentments" (161). Josepha Sherman and T.K.F. Weisskopf expand on this, writing that subversive children’s songs "fearlessly take on the taboos and terrors of the adult world and turn them into things that can be safely mocked" (11). But while these songs "strike back against the chaos" (11), they also embody some of that chaos, reflecting adult attitudes toward such subjects as males, females, and violence as a means of processing those attitudes. In fact, Alison Newell contends that such songs "may be one facet of the continuing social problems of violence against women" (109). In any case, the songs can be seen as a continuing measure of the attitudes adults pass down to children, sometimes unconsciously, toward gender.

While taunting songs have long been an equal opportunity game, several folklore studies suggest that little girls are also becoming more liberated when it comes to peeping songs. These two genres include lyrics designed to get the attention of the opposite sex as well as to express cultural fears about pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases. Many of the songs also act as a kind of verbal sexual experimentation, exploring differences and limits. But while reporting songs in these categories, two people I interviewed recalled examples that from an adult perspective seem to be rape narratives—one in which the rape itself is subsumed by pregnancy in the first case and by male boasting about having scored in the second.

Ruth, 34, recalls singing in Wichita, Kansas in the early ’70s:
Tra ra ra boom de ay!
I met a boy today.
He gave me 50 cents
to go behind the fence.
He threw me on the ground.
He pulled my panties down.
Won’t Mommy be surprised
to see my tummy rise?
Here, the rather offhand narrator seems to be processing the origins of pregnancy without any recognition of the implied rape. Jim, 52, who grew up in Ohio, reported what seems to have been the same song from a male point of view twenty years earlier:
Tra ra ra boom de ay!
Have you had yours today?
I had mine yesterday
from the girl across the way.
I laid her on the couch
and all she said was "Ouch!"
Tra ra ra boom de ay!
Tra ra ra boom de ay!
In both versions, the male plays the active role while the female is the passive recipient of his action, completely objectified in the second version. As a result, the popular refrain "Tra ra ra boom de ay" sandwiches a tone of boastful entitlement between a seeming battle cry and victory drums. It may be an encouraging sign of progress in social attitudes that no one else I interviewed knew this version. Nor does it appear in other folklore collections, suggesting it may have faded from use.

However, the pattern is replicated in many other popular children’s songs: male characters tend to create their own fates while females are acted on by outside forces. In "Deadeye the Western Cowboy," our parody of "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer," Deadeye brings doom on himself by committing murder. At first, Deadeye endures ostracism because of his "very shiny gun" so frightening, "you would drop your pants and run." Typically excluded from poker games, Deadeye’s status rises when he’s chosen by the sheriff "one Saturday night" to assassinate his wife. In most versions, though, the other cowboys don’t agree by ensure Deadeye’s place in history the way the reindeer do Rudolph’s; instead, most versions end with the cowboys happily condemning Deadeye to be hanged from a tree or sent to the penitentiary. This song was once widespread, the character I knew as Deadeye being known elsewhere as Randolph the Six-Shooter Cowpoke, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Gangster, Roundoff the Bull-legged Cowboy (all from Bronner 104), Randolph the Bow-legged Cowboy (Sherman and Weisskopf 146) and Mavrick the Lonely Cowboy (Sherman and Weisskopf 147). Furthermore, most versions were reported by people who learned them between 1950 and the mid-’70s; despite the continuing popularity of "Rudolph," this song seems less pervasive than it once was—probably, according to Simon J. Bronner, due to the fact that children are less likely to be familiar with Gene Autry, the "cowboy singer" who originally recorded "Rudolph" (104).

While "Deadeye" focuses much of its hostility on an off-stage female character, the three Kings of Orient Are become the only victims of their own bad judgment. In the version I learned, we disposed of all three kings quite rapidly, switching from first person to third in the course of the song as if renouncing our own identification with the kings. The cigar "was loaded and exploded— / now they’re on yonder star." Others executed the song as a cumulative piece: first three kings, then two, then one, try to smoke a rubber cigar, which explodes at the end of each verse. All three kings dispensed with, the singer finishes with the first line of another Christmas carol. Jim recalls that in Decatur, Georgia, in the late ’40s/early ’50s the line was "Silent Night, Holy Night," as it was for Sam in Houston. Sherman and Weisskopf add "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" (143), and Randy provides "Hark the Herald Angels sing, glory to the three dead kings" from Wichita, Kansas, in the late 1960s. Kings were mythical figures, removed from our experience, and those who sang about them did so with no pity for the hapless kings who failed to learn their lesson about rubber cigars. A former student who grew up in the ’80s in St. Louis, where the Famous-Barr department store is headquartered, recalled a version in which the kings get themselves in trouble instead through a criminal act: "We three kings of Orient Are / stealing gifts from Famous Barr ."

Two female heroines I recall—the very popular Bonnie and the more obscure Alice—don’t actively cause their grief. Instead, they suffer from diseases and accidents, some of them more accidental than others in Bonnie’s case. In San Antonio in the mid-’80s, Carlos sang:

My Bonnie has tuberculosis,
My Bonnie has only one lung,
My Bonnie can cough up raw oysters
And roll them around on her tongue.
Folklorists who report similar songs about poor tubercular Bonnie account for their humor and attraction in various ways. Simon J. Bronner suggests that the song creates amusement by giving the "sentimental tone of the original. . . an ugly twist, which of course lends a certain amount of humor as children see it" (102). Sherman and Weisskopf suggest that the song borrows from the terror once associated with diseases like tuberculosis, the remnants of which have outlasted the threat of the disease itself (217). But through the song, children also reaffirm gender roles. Bonnie generates humor partly because she’s so downright gross, surprising us with her crass violation of gender expectations. Nevertheless, Bonnie is resilient, turning her misfortune into an entertaining talent. In other tales about Bonnie, she’s not the victim of a disease, but of the speaker, as in this version also reported by Carlos:
My Bonnie leaned over the dumpster
The height of its contents to see.
I gave her a boost to assist her.
Oh bring back my Bonnie to me.
 
Sherman and Weisskopf (182) supply another verse:
My Bonnie lay over the gas tank
The contents she wanted to see.
I lighted a match to assist her
Oh bring back my Bonnie to me.
"I think there were other verses, all describing the various mutilations of poor Bonnie, but sadly, I can’t remember them," Carlos wrote.

An accident brought about by an implied eating disorder does away with poor Alice, whose tale is a hybrid of disparate elements: a dawning public awareness of eating disorders in the early ’70s, when I learned the song, and allusions to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The short, fairly tuneless song gets to the point quickly, shifting tense or perspective with almost every line:

Alice, where are you going?
Upstairs to take a bath.
Alice with legs like toothpicks
and a neck like a giraffe.
Alice got in the bathtub.
Alice pulled up the plug.
Oh my land! Oh my soul!
There goes Alice down the hole!
We were more fascinated by the forbidden aspects of the song—the naked heroine, the sexual connotations of the word hole—than by the implications of being so thin as to disappear. Despite the increase in eating disorders among girls, I did not find the song collected nor were many of my respondents familiar with it.

The female teachers we sang about were also prone to imagined victimization—but this time, by us. The casts of our fictional and highly implausible dramas echoed the typical hierarchies of our schools: female teachers and more distant male principals, whom we also occasionally hanged and flushed in our songs. These songs have maintained a popularity that most of the previously-cited songs have not. In more recent versions, female principals have cropped up, but few male teachers. Although the songs do not exclude males and suggest a generalized rebellion against authority, they do target more females than they used to, perhaps giving the effect of escalating animosity toward female authority figures.

Teachers face a range of mostly comical, cartoonish situations. In "Row Row Row Your Boat" teachers lose little more than their dignity, provided they can swim:

Row row row your boat
gently down the stream.
Throw your teacher overboard
and listen to her scream.
Things get more serious in yet another takeoff of "Tra ra ra boom de ay," in which the teacher is thrown to mutilating sharks that render her body as smelly as "sauerkraut" or "sour trout," depending on the version (Knapp 176). And I refused to sing beyond the first verse of "On Top of Old Smokey," because I disapproved of the insult to the teacher’s appearance, much less the more violent acts that appear in subsequent verses. Noel from Grand Junction, Colorado, and Mark from Tulsa, Oklahoma, recalled lyrics I remember shunning:
On Top of Old Smokey
all covered with sand,
I shot my poor teacher
with a green rubber band.
I shot her with pleasure,
I shot her with pride,
I couldn’t have missed her—
She’s forty feet wide.
Oliver, 11, of Lincoln, Nebraska, supplied me with fragments from more verses that he admitted were somewhat redundant, and Sam from Houston filled in the gaps:
On top of Old Smokey
All covered with blood,
I shot my poor teacher
With a loaded shotgun.
I went to her funeral,
She still wasn’t dead,
So I got my bazooka,
And blew off her head.
Dave, 28, of Forsyth, Missouri, added another verse:
I went to her funeral,
I went to her grave,
Instead of throwing flowers
I threw a grenade.
Bronner quotes an even more gruesome version:
 
 
On Top of Old Smokey,
all covered with blood,
I shot my poor teacher
with a twenty-two slug.
With a knife in her belly
and an ax in her head,
I had the impression
that my teacher was dead. (277)
In this masterpiece of understatement, the singer doesn’t even bother with a rubber band. All of these versions have been in circulation since the early ’70s, and all target female teachers.

It is necessary to look at these songs from the perspective of the exaggerated, gruesome tradition from which they arise and to acknowledge the way children defuse their resentment of teachers’ control over their lives with humor. They rarely target real, particular teachers so much as an institution of adults who limit their freedom. But while children apparently sing as a way to try out forbidden ideas they would never carry out, testing limits to reassure themselves that they exist, the songs also make fun of adult hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness. Children may be told that racism is wrong, but those who perceive racist attitudes in surrounding adults are more likely to sing subversive songs with racist lyrics. In the same way, the songs reflect cultural ambivalence toward powerful women.

The connection between racial and gender hostility is embodied in one evolution of the counting-out rhyme "Eeny Meeny Miny Moe." Despite its origin as a racial slur, the rhyme shifted widely in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement from what was once a possible reference to lynching in "Catch a nigger by the toe" to the more innocuous "Catch a tiger by the toe" (Sherman and Weisskopf 232). One reported version of "Eeny Meeny Miny Moe" instead replaces the racial pejorative with teacher:

Eeny meeny miney moe
Catch your teacher by the toe
If he squirms, squeeze it tight
Then you take a great big bite. (Sherman and Weissskopf 114)
Obviously, the rhyme had reverted to pure nonsense, the violence enacted toward the male teacher quite mild in comparison to the bazookas, axes, and grenades in "On Top of Old Smokey." Certainly, the rhyme had lost most of its hostility and historical reference. But by the time the bitten toe image came down to me, it was in the midst of much more violent images—and directed toward a female teacher.

In "Heigh ho, heigh ho, It’s Off to School We Go," we envisioned taking along "razorblades and handgrenades," then learning "some junk and then we flunk." Shayla Mae, a college student from Kansas City, reports singing a different version ten years later, an even sillier one that resists a trend toward increased violence, employing insects as its primary weapons:

Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to school we go
with guns and knives and full bee hives.
Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to school we go.
We’ll put some ants down teacher’s pants!
Among the more potent verses about razorblades and handgrenades I learned was one that struck me as too senseless to bother with—one also reported to me by Dave, 28, who learned it as a child in Missouri: "Heigh ho, heigh ho, I bit the teacher’s toe. / She bit me back, that dirty rat."

Biting a teacher’s toe seemed to me pointless; besides, what was the fun of a teacher who bit back? The possible history of this verse suggests that expressing hostility toward women in authority remains acceptable while, thankfully, hostility toward minority groups does not. However, the verse has a tongue-in-cheek tone that emphasizes its own ridiculousness, the powerless, ineffectual position of the singer, and the teacher’s right and ability to get revenge.

More often, we children fantasized getting our revenge; one of the most widespread songs, a parody of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," first evolved as a protest against corporal punishment (Sherman and Weisskopf 226). However, by the time I sang it, that motivation had been lost while imagined violence had escalated. We sang,

Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the burning of the school.
We have tortured every teacher,
we have broken every rule.
When the principal tried to stop us,
we just flushed him down the stool.
We finished the verse with "us brats are marching on," an element of self-critique missing from most other versions. Before the mid-’60s or so, students used fruit as their primary weapon, as in the following version reported by Elaine, who grew up in Weir, Kansas, and by Sherman and Weisskopf (106). The chorus retained the reference to corporal punishment even though many had never experienced it firsthand:
Glory glory hallelujah!
Teacher hit me with a ruler.
Hit her in the bean with a rotten tangerine,
and she won’t be coming round no more.
Others hit the ruler-wielding teacher—who is male in only one report—"in the eye with a piece of apple pie" (Sherman and Weisskopf 106); "on the spot with a rotten apricot" (Sherman and Weisskopf 106); and "in the butt with a rotten coconut" (Sara, Washington D.C., ’70s). In the late 1960s while living in various east coast cities, my friend Darrend, whose biology and rhyming ability were both a bit challenged, "hit her in the nut with a rotten coconut." In these early versions, the most dramatic results involved juice squirting or teeth that "came marching out" (Knapp 173). Gradually, though, kids ceased to mess with fruit much. In 1970s Wichita, we "met her at the door with a loaded .44." In more recent versions, kids envision getting rid of the teacher by confronting her "at the bank with a loaded army tank" (Sherman and Weisskopf 104); "in the attic with a semi-automatic" (Bronner 98); "in the hall with a Nazi cannonball" (qtd. in Bronner 276); "at the prom with a nuclear bomb" (qtd. in Bronner 276); "in the seater with a .22 repeater" (Sherman and Weisskopf 106); and "on the run with a really big shotgun" (Sherman and Weisskopf 104).

As in "Glory, Glory Hallelujah," destruction of the school and authority figures by fire was popular. While "Deck the Halls with Gasoline" mockingly advocates arson, our version of "Joy to the World" rejoiced that

the school burned down,
and all the teachers, too.
They’re looking for the principal,
He’s hanging from the flagpole,
With a rope around his neck,
a rope around his neck,
a rope, a rope, around his neck.
Here, most of the glee is directed toward the male principal’s gruesome death. An even more popular version celebrates the female teacher’s bizarre death and burial:
Joy to the world, the teacher’s dead,
We barbecued her head.
What happened to her body?
We flushed it down the potty.
And around and around it went
And around and around it went
and around, and around, and around it went. (Sherman and Weisskopf 113)
This endlessly-useful song resurfaced in the ’90s as an anti-Barney song, categorizing hardworking flesh-and-blood teachers with TV’s saccharine purple dinosaur (Sherman and Weisskopf 199)—perhaps, unintentionally, the greatest insult of all.

I was not an arsonist or a murderer in training. I would have been bored and distressed without the stimulation school and my mostly-female teachers provided. But in the same vein, I sang, "Comet, it makes you vomit, so have some comet, and vomit today," although I felt no particular hostility toward household cleansers. I sang, "McDonald’s is your kind of place, hamburgers in your face. . . I want my money back before I have a heart attack," but nevertheless, every Sunday, I begged to eat at McDonald’s. And I had a moral center; I refused to engage in what I saw as truly disgusting, such as the songs the Knapps categorize as "fartlore" (211), the best known example being the ever-popular one recalled by more than a third of the people I surveyed, ranging in age from 11 to 42 and in geography from New York to Colorado:

"Jingle Bells, Batman smells / Robin laid an egg." I participated in some songs because of the prestige and delight at the illusion of rebellion even while I remained safely a good child. I sang because I felt smarter if I pretended to be skeptical about commercial claims or cynical about Christmas. And, certainly, some children sang because they disliked school and used the songs as a way of enjoying "a secret advantage," as Bronner suggests, over the teacher who was unaware of the existence of the songs (277-78). And finally, making fun of the violence in the world around us, converting it to something ridiculous, made us feel immune to it.

But the fact remains that our songs perpetuated gender stereotypes handed down from our culture. As long as it seems normal to emphasize female passivity, hostility will continue toward women who buck that stereotype and assume positions of authority. Because children are picking up on and echoing adult ambivalence, censorship or bowdlerization of the songs is likely to be ineffective, attacking the symptoms rather than the disease. Songbook compiler Charles Keller may have discovered this after making what appears to be an attempt to curb increasing song violence in his 1976 "collection of humorous songs set to old, familiar tunes." His parody of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" begins by celebrating "the downfall of the school," making it sound as if the school lost a football game instead of burning down. Rather than "torturing" the teachers, Keller’s version commemorates "bothering" them; rather than flushing, crucifying, shooting, or hanging the principal, his version pictures "tickling" him or her. The chorus deletes the student’s retaliation for the humiliation of being unjustly punished with a ruler. Instead, the chorus implies that such a punishment is so rare as to be "peculiar" but was entirely justified by the student’s bad behavior:

Glory glory how peculiar,
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Cause I hit her in the bean
with a rotten tangerine
and the juice came running down. (Keller 6)
No survey results indicate that this bowdlerized version ever caught on.

Nancy McCabe
305 Pinehaven Ext. #45
Laurens SC 29360

WORKS CITED

Bronner, Simon J. American Children’s Folklore. Little Rock: August House, 1988

Keller, Charles. Glory, Glory, How Peculiar. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1976.

Knapp, Mary, and Herbert Knapp. One Potato, Two Potato:The Secret Education of American Schoolchildren. New York: W.W. Norton and Co, Inc.

Newell, Alison. "Schoolyard Songs in Montreal: Violence as Response." Children’s Literature, 19:3 (1994): 109-112.

Sherman, Josepha, and T.K.F. Weisskopf. Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts:The Subversive Folklore of Childhood. Little Rock, August House, 1995.