 | ||
"Miss Lucy had a baby...", also known by various other names, is an American schoolyard rhyme. Originally used as a jump-rope chant, it is now more often sung alone or as part of a clapping game. It has many variations, possibly originating from it, or from its predecessors.
Contents
The song is often combined or confused with the similar but cruder "Miss Susie had a steamboat", which uses the same tune and was also used as a jump-rope game.
Structure
As in "Miss Susie", the rhyme is organized by its meter, an accentual verse, in trimeter. Accentual verse allows for set number of accents regardless of the number of syllables in the verse. It is a common form in English folk verse, especially in nursery rhymes and jump-rope rhymes. The song shares much of the same melody as the 1937 "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" used by Warner Bros. as the theme to their Looney Tunes cartoons.
History
A history of the Miss Suzie had a steamboat similar rhyme has been studied, tracing it back to the 1950s. but several other books and articles show similar versions used as far back as the end of the 19th century.
"Miss Lucy" probably developed from verses of much older (and cruder) songs, although the opposite may also be true, most commonly known as "Bang Bang Rosie" in Britain, "Bang Away Lulu" in Appalachia, and "My Lula Gal" in the West. These songs were sometimes political, usually openly crude, and occasionally infanticidal.
In those songs, the baby, that was dropped in the chamber pot bathtub, was referencing an enormously popular mascot of Force cereal named Sunny Jim, introduced in the United States in 1902 and in Britain a few years later. Following his declining popularity, the baby is now usually encountered as Tiny Tim, once famous as a Depression-era comic strip and still well known as a character in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The verse was first recorded as a joke in the 1920s and as the modern children's song in New York in 1938. Although the song derives from lyrics about an unwed whore, few children consider that Miss Lucy might be unmarried; instead, the concern of the song has shifted to the appearance of new siblings. The opening lines now often change to "My mother had a baby..." or "I had a little brother..."
The variants including a woman with an alligator purse urging the baby's mother to vote have been seen as a reference to Susan B. Anthony, an American suffragette, It was later attributed to a social worker which was their typical dress code in the 1950s
A version of the song appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's 1964 film Marnie, about a woman overcoming a childhood trauma. Although the ending seems closed, some argue the song serves to ironically establish that nothing ever was wrong with the title character. It also appears in country singer Chely Wright's song "Alligator Purse" from her 1996 album Right in the Middle of It.
In the 1990s the singer Lucy Peach popularized a version of the song with the words "I had a little turtle, its name was Tiny Tim". Following that, there have been versions of "Miss Suzy had a turtle, she called it Tiny Tim", and an Egyptian Tortoise was named Tiny Tim at the Zoological Society of London Whipsnade Zoo.
Possible references to the song's characters, or sources for their names, are:
Lyrics
Several versions exist, varying across time and regionally: