If you live long enough, you might learn about an American ballad, sailors' song, cowboy song, college song, parody, limerick, other humorous verse or doggerel that has been around long enough to be considered "latter-day folk-lore" in 1927. Like this ditty:
The Postman came
On the first of May,
The Policeman came
The very next day,
Nine months later
There was hell to pay;
Who fired the shot?
The Blue or the Gray?
There's a ton of crude stuff at the link. I confess I enjoyed reading James Whitcomb Riley's "The Passing of the Backhouse," which is about the privy that was a half-mile from the house. Well, it probably felt like that when you needed it. As an old joke (which I just read for the first time today) says, "We had a fire in the bathroom. Luckily it did not spread to the house."
I was surprised to see a string of Eugene Field's work included in this Immortalia. Here we read the depressing "Little Boy Blue" in school when we could have been reading about "Little Willie" the bedwetter.
There's also an 18-stanza rendition of "Frankie and Johnny." Who fired the shot?
Then came the scene in the courthouse:
Frankie said, as bold as brass,
"Judge, I didn't shoot him in the third degree,
I shot him in his big fat ass;
'Cause he was my man,
An' was a-doin' me wrong!"
The Postman came
On the first of May,
The Policeman came
The very next day,
Nine months later
There was hell to pay;
Who fired the shot?
The Blue or the Gray?
There's a ton of crude stuff at the link. I confess I enjoyed reading James Whitcomb Riley's "The Passing of the Backhouse," which is about the privy that was a half-mile from the house. Well, it probably felt like that when you needed it. As an old joke (which I just read for the first time today) says, "We had a fire in the bathroom. Luckily it did not spread to the house."
I was surprised to see a string of Eugene Field's work included in this Immortalia. Here we read the depressing "Little Boy Blue" in school when we could have been reading about "Little Willie" the bedwetter.
There's also an 18-stanza rendition of "Frankie and Johnny." Who fired the shot?
Then came the scene in the courthouse:
Frankie said, as bold as brass,
"Judge, I didn't shoot him in the third degree,
I shot him in his big fat ass;
'Cause he was my man,
An' was a-doin' me wrong!"