Gershon Legman: Bawdy Monologues and Rhymed Recitations

The is copyright 1976 by G. Legman and is used by permission. All rights are reserved.

Southern Folklore Quarterly 40(1976), 59-122

BAWDY MONOLOGUES
AND RHYMED RECITATIONS
by
G. Legman

Bawdy monologues are extremely ancient: certain passages of the Bible, such as the long erotic parables of the 16th and 23rd chapters of Ezekiel (6th century B.C.) and the 17th chapter of Revelations (2nd century a.d.), add up to very little else. This was evidently a standard Jewish form of exhortation, as in Jesus' scatological parable in Matthew, xv. 15-17, concerning that which "goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught" or privy. The function or intention in those days was unquestionably to reprimand sin or indicate a moral lesson by means of striking and homely images. This has not essentially changed, though the moral and exhortatory purpose of modern bawdy monologues and rhymed recitations is sometimes rather lost sight of in the florid obscenity of the images used. Nevertheless, it is there — obviously in burlesque or reversed form.

Excellent materials on this very large subject will be found in Robert C. Elliott's magistral The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton University Press, 1960), and I have gathered extensive modern and historical examples in Rationale of the Dirty Joke: Second Series (1975) chap. 14, "Dysphemism & Insults," pp. 672-809, to which brief references will be made below to avoid lengthy reduplications. Perhaps the best expression of the true modern function of such monologues and recitations will be found in an article on "Rural Traditions of the Snake River Valley [Idaho/ Oregon]," by Louie Attebery, in Northwest Folklore (1965) No. 2: pp. 28-29, excerpted and discussed more fully in Rationale 11. 114-17.

Prof. Attebery explains the folk phrase, "Whistle or sing, Or show your thing," by noting that during the harvesting of grain, "when there was a breakdown in some machine or when it was raining, the crew would get together and entertain themselves . . . in a barn or bunkhouse, and each man in turn was challenged to 'Whistle or sing, Or show your thing.' Each man then did what he could to provide some kind of entertainment, which was not

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nearly so limited as the trio of suggested activities. Some men would recite verse, 'Mona's Waters,' for instance, an old sentimental piece. Another might sing. A third might perform a feat of strength and challenge the rest to try to duplicate it. ... Almost all the men responded to the challenge in some way, lest he have to pay the penalty."

The whole format here implies a sort of ordeal or trial-by-display, in which the crude physical forfeit (including the feats of strength) would be required only of those who failed at the more musical or intellectual offering. This is very similar to such erotic games and initiations among young boys as "cockalizing," "catching a bird," and especially "pecker-poker," played when swimming "bare-ass" or in the boys' secret club bunkhouses, when the loser at cards must not only lift and display his penis but must allow all the other players to strike it painfully with their bunched packets of cards. There arc also the even more frankly sexual "circle-jerks" or "peter-pulling contests" (also centuries old: see Rationale II. 110-111), in which all the participants masturbate themselves or each other in full view. These are the original and physical counterparts of the erotic verbal display of the bawdy monologues, which of course often replace the old sentimental pieces cited by Prof. Attebery, and have been for centuries the barroom version or development of "Whistle or sing, Or show your thing."

One may therefore parallel to this forfeit-challenge the standard barroom recitation, by means of which the dead-broke hobo or bum, desperate for a drink — but not so desperate as to "Show his thing" — would earn a shot of whiskey from the bartender, falling dead at the end over the girl's face he has sketched on the floor in chalk while reciting! "The Face on the Barroom Floor." (And compare "The Volunteer Organist.") Other offered recitations frankly begin, "Gimme a drink, bartender" as for example the bawdy "Down in the Lehigh Valley," a hobo favorite. It is also clear that the obscene recitation in dramatic prose or doggerel verse is a sort of sexual though not anatomical display; and only as such can be understood the enormous quantity of these in the Victorian and more recent bawdy songster pamphlets. The comparison with Negro narrative "toasts" is also instructive. Reams of white-culture recitations, rhymed and otherwise, will be found in the curious and very rare American erotic miscellany, The Stag Party [Boston?

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1888], and in the similar but much inferior Bibliotheque Erotique ('London' [Detroit: McClurg], 1929) in two volumes, re-issued in twenty pamphlet parts as Library L'Amour (sic) about 1930. There are copies of both these rare works, and others similar, in the Kinsey Library, Institute for Sex Research, Indiana University.

Mock speeches and complaints of bawdy contents are a particular favorite among the monologues, and the group of modern texts below will include examples of this type. They are a clear development from the allowed liberties of the Saturnalia, especially in churches and synagogues, as celebrated in Europe from late medieval times onward, under the names of Purim, the "Feast of Fools," and the like. Spoken and printed prototypes of this kind of speech will be found as far back as the early 16th century in Italy, for example the Processus contra Ser Catium Vinculum, probably by the original "macaronic" humorist, Teofilo Folengo, of which only one copy has survived. (See my The Horn Book, 1964, p. 209.) In Isaac Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature (ed. London, 1849) ii. 291 note, mention is made of a rare quarto tract, Gesta Grayorum, or The History of the High and Mighty Prince Henry (1688), which is "full of burlesque speeches and addresses," presumably dating back to 1594.

These are nothing more than a continuation of the burlesque disquisitions pronounced before the Italian mock academies of the early 16th century and since, such as the Intronati (or "Dunderpates"), a type of thing that continued for centuries, and that still exists, in France and England. Also in America, in the various bawdy-limerick societies, with their "Annual Norman Douglas Memorial Lecture" and the like. The Stag Party [1888] mentioned above is essentially a record of the transactions of just such an American mock academy, called in its pages "The Chestnut Club" (probably the Papyrus Club of Boston), all the jokes, recitations, and facetić presented being erotic.

The work of the first and greatest of the Italian mock-academicians, Antonio Vignale, his La Cazzaria, or "The Book of the Prick" (1530), subtitled "The History of the War Between the Cunts and the Pricks," is just a series of strung-together burlesque dissertations on sexual subjects, filled with bawdy jokes and folktales retold, and is altogether the most astonishing collection of erotic folk-beliefs and just-so stories in the literature of the world. (See

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further, Rationale II. 726.) French and German translations of this fabulous work have long existed, and a very racy English translation made by Samuel Putnam in the 1930's under the title of Dialogue on Diddling: La Cazzaria "by Sir Hotspur Dunderpate (Arsiccio Intronato)" was recently printed in rather crude style in a pocketbook series: Collectors Publications, No. 21220; City of Industry, Calif., 1968. This should be snapped up by wise folklorists before it disappears, as it is a feast of folkloristic fantasy and delight. So also the enormous collection of mock dissertations and burlesque eulogies in Latin, many of them bawdy or scatological, in the great Amphitheatrum sapientić Socraticć joco-serić, edited by Caspar Dornau (Hanover, 1619, 2 vols. in-folio: copies, New York Public Library, and University of Kansas).

The same is true of that excellent but little-mined folklore source, Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence Display'd by Gilbert Crockat & John Monroe (ed. Rotterdam, 1738); while in The Foundling Hospital for Wit (1749), anonymously edited by Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Part VI. 22, a mock "Speech without Doors, in Answer to a supposed Speech Within" is purportedly given by the groom of a Member of Parliament to an audience of his peers. This is similar to the most famous such modern American speech, "Change the Name of Arkansaw?!" which is not given in the present article, though it is the most extraordinary of its type, as full unexpurgated texts will be found in James R. Masterson's Tall Tales of Arkansaw (Boston: Chapman & Grimes, 1942) chap. 13, "Hell, No!" pp. 180-85; with the authentic texts courageously given at that date, in the notes pp. 352-8. Another very remarkable text of this is printed in Rationale II. 755-8, from Vance Randolph's great "unprintable" tale collection, Pissing in the Snow, and Other Ozark Folktales (ms. 1954) No. 69, of which the complete publication is now under consideration by the University of Illinois Press.

In a large number of bawdy monologues and rhymed recitations, of which "Change the Name of Arkansaw?!" is just one — see "Daniel in the Lions' Den" and others below — the intention is clearly to display the reciter's presumed virility in being a "man-of-words" or master-speaker, who has the perverse courage to drag down and verbally soil all the patriotic and sexual shibboleths of his culture, and abrogate all its moral rules and taboos, for example

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those connected with being gallant toward women. Thus, while he recites his monologue or "toast," he poses for his audience and represents to them a sort of hero of obscenity or profane anti-priest, with the monologue as the bawdy litany of his Black Mass. And he rolls out his roughly memorized spiel in a highly dramatic, purposely over-emphatic style, like rhythmed prose or in loose couplets; accentuating in this way the ritual quality of his antigallant, anti-family, anti-authoritarian, and sometimes even anti-godlin function. A function perfectly expressed in America in the 1860's by Walt Whitman, and in the 1960's by the professional monologuist, the late Lenny Bruce (Leonard Schneider), who has already arrived at the stage of apotheosis in movies and biographies glorifying, imitating, and admiring his "sick humor" nightclub act. There is nothing new about this: in the century of Shakespeare at least half a dozen such vaudeville humorists entertained the salve-sellers' street audiences and at theatre interludes in France, and were enormously popular; in particular one known as Bruscambille (N. Deslauriers), many of whose harangues were published as his Fantaisies and Prologues facécieux about 1615.

The cruel and dominated environment of prison life, and that of disfranchised and underprivileged races and social classes, such as hoboes, creates a particular appreciation of such aggressive verbal fantasies and a wide attempt to achieve the status of the man-of-words who has the courage to be "ba-a-a-d!" Or, in full dysphemistic glory, a "bad-ass motherfucker," a current term of approval which itself shows perfectly the admired anti-gallant and anti-family abrogation of taboo in (verbal) action. The largest repertory of such dysphemistic monologues and recitations is to be found today in the black subculture in America, on mock-jungle or crime-pimping-and-gambling backgrounds; and these have been very fully published in Roger D. Abrahams' Deep Down in the Jungle (1964, and revised ed. 1970) and in Bruce Jackson's Get Your Ass In the Water and Swim Like Me (Harvard University Press, 1974), under the name of "toasts."

This term does not correctly match the form of these recitations, and was apparently picked up in the American South from the Scottish immigrant population, since the floridly obscene "toasts" still exist in Scotland, as will be seen below. Almost none of the recitations printed by Abrahams and Jackson are found among

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whites, and conversely only two or three of the bawdy rhymed recitations common among whites appear in their books, in particular a highly reworked text of "Our Lil" and one or two set pieces. Black and white repertories in this line therefore cannot be considered identical, and do not derive from the same inspiration except perhaps as to their British origin and the defiant underlying emotion.

It was once the habit in folklore studies, and in fact still is to a degree, to avoid and evade the often very bawdy words of many folksongs, sea shanties and the like, by concentrating on publishing endless volumes of their printed music, with expurgated texts or only a token stanza or two to carry the tune. The many volumes of American and British folksongs over the last two centuries, ending now with the large conspectuses by the Lomaxes, by Sharp and Karpeles, and most recently Peter Kennedy, are elegant examples of this system of musical elaboration combined with textual pussyfooting, all heavily protected by copyright. It therefore does not seem to me desirable to spend too much space, in this first published article on bawdy monologues and rhymed recitations, on either the remote literary history or even the sociological and psychological analysis of the field-collected texts, many of which have never yet appeared in public print — to the detriment of printing the texts. I will limit myself accordingly to relatively brief headnotes, along with some further notes as to items not printed here at all, as being of lesser interest or else available in existing printed sources, many of which are of course admittedly rare.

I. DRAMATIC MONOLOGUES

"The HAMBURG Show," or "Larry, Turn the Crank." — Of 19th-century origin, this represents the spiel of a showman exhibiting stereopticon slides on a screen, a development of the earlier portable peep-show or "raree"-show, which was also sometimes grossly sexual. This picture-show element is largely forgotten in modern texts, especially those with a chorus sung by the audience, which often also omit the key refrain to the showman's boy-helper, "Larry, turn the crank!" The situation thus becomes that of a zookeeper exhibiting live animals. Observe the "accident" to a member of the audience in the Australian text below.

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The Stag Party (1888) unnumb. pp. 216-18, gives the first and fullest bawdy text, as "Short Sketches of Bible History," without any animals but including the repeated stage-business and refrain, "Boy, turn the crank." This ends in a fist-fight with the audience, when the Irish showman, discussing his peep-show slide of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, remarks gratuitously: "But no, he [Joseph] would rather risk being sent to a loathsome dungeon than accede to her solicitations, which shows the difference between him and you, you son-of-a-bitch, who would give up your last five dollar piece to have a rap at the damndest old Chinese whore that ever came prowling about the diggings." "Who are you calling a son-of-a-bitch?" asks the man at the peephole. And with that the fight begins. This is perhaps the unexpurgated version of the milder similar scene about the wax statue of "Judas Iskariot" in Charles Farrar Browne's Artemus Ward, His Book (1862).

Polite texts of the recitation are sometimes entitled "The Amberg Show" or similar, which is assumed to be the name of the showman. The earliest polite version I have found is in The Fountain of Mirth (Paisley: G. Caldwell, 1840) pp. 19-23. (Copy: Ohio State Univ., Legman Collection.) This is reprinted with inferior variants, and expurgation throughout of the words "damned" and "damme," in John Ashton's Modern Street Ballads (London, 1888) pp. 111-15, as "Humours of Bartlemy [St. Bartholomew] Fair." Compare Ben Jonson's play, Bartholomew Fair (ca. 1610), especially the circus side-show style display of the child — probably really a midget— with a very large penis. Dr. Richard Reuss is preparing a study of American rhymed texts of "The Hamburg Show" as a song, beginning with one in Plantation Bob Hart's Songster (1862: copy, Library of Congress).

Unexpurgated modern texts are given in: Immortalia ('Philadelphia,' 1927), just before the final section of limericks; and in Bibliotheque Erotique ('London' [Detroit], 1929) vol. II; also in John Brophy & Eric Partridge's Songs and Slang of the British Soldier (1931: a purified text); in Folk Poems and Ballads ('Mexico City, 1945' [Cleveland, 1948]) p. 63; and in Harry Morgan's More Rugby Songs (London, 1968) pp. 101-3, the fullest version. A manuscript text of 6 paragraphs or stanzas, "The Hamburger Show," with the music of the chorus, is in the Western Kentucky Folklore Archive (now at the University of California, Los Angeles), collec-

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ted at the Baron's Club, Bowling Green, Kentucky, Dec. 1956. This is quite different from the earlier texts, and also from the British examples printed below. It includes a form of the paragraph now common in American texts, about the "Kee-kee bird" (or similar), that "ff-t-t-ts up its tail-feathers and slides down icebergs on Us ass, yelling "Kee-Kee-rist!! it's cold!" (or "Kee-rist!! what a sensation!") In another variant ending, it is explained how the Rhinoceros (or Unicorn) with the impenetrable skin is captured: "He has, in fact, one vulnerable spot in his iron hide beneath his tail. [Compare Achilles' heel; also Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied, where the vulnerable paranoid spot is in his "back"]. The intrepid African hunters throw black pepper into the great beast's norstrils, whereupon ker-choo!! up goes his tail, in goes the javelin, and the Monarch of the Desert lies prostrate. — Larry, turn the crank!"

A. Recited by a 35-year-old male art-teacher, Chelmsford, Essex, England, May 1953, who had heard it in 1948; title, "Showmanship."

Roll up, roll up, lydies and gentlemen! Come and see the Camuel. — Hay most peculiar hanimal wot heats straw and shits through a tri-hanuglar horifice: hence the Pyramids.

Roll up, roll up, lydies and gents! Here we 'ave the Leopard: 365 spots, one for heach die of the year. —Wot's that, lydy? — That's right. — George, lift its tail, and show the lydy leap-year.

Roll up, roll up, lydies and gentlemen. Come and see the Wild Cat. — It ain't got no arsehole — that's what makes it so bloody wild!

Roll up, roll up, and see the Walla Walla bird: flies round in hever-diminishing circles 'til it flies hup its own fundamental horifice and disappears!

B. "The Wild West Show," from a mimeographed collection, 66 pages long, caption-title Be Pure! [Perth, Australia: University of Perth Engineering Students' Society, 1963] pp. 49-50. The young Australian aerospace engineer who supplied the copy of Be Pure! added-in the bracketed variant line of the chorus, and stated that the "best verse" is missing. It is given here first:

[Here, lydies and gentlemen, we have the Fuckawi tribe.

— Fuckawi tribe? Faaan-TAS-tic!!

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The three-foot Fuckawi tribe lives in deepest Africa where the grass is four feet high. — Comes up over their eyes! They run wildly through the tall grass, agitating their spears and shields, while shouting, "We're the Fuckawi? We're the Fuckawi?"]

Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the hippopotamus.

—The hippopotamus? [Faaan-TAS-tic!!]

Yes, the hippopotamus is an amazing animal. When its eyes are open its arsehole is closed. And when its eyes are closed its arsehole is open. Someone threw pepper in its eyes, and Christ he's got diarrhoea!

Oh we're off to see the wild west show,
The elephant and the kangaroo-oo-oo.
Never mind the weather, we're all in this together
[As long as we're together, bugger the bloody weather],
We're off to the see wild west show.

Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the ooligooli bird.

— The ooligooli bird? [Faaan-TAS-tic!!]

Yes, the ooligooli bird is an amazing bird. It flies but it has no legs. And when it lands, ooooli-gooooli!

Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the giraffe.

— The giraffe? [Faaan-TAS-tic!!]

Yes, the giraffe is an amazing animal. It is the only animal in the jungle that can go into a bar and say, "The high balls are on me!"

Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the sphinx.

— The sphinx? [Faaan-TAS-tic!!]

Yes, the sphinx is an amazing animal. It is the only animal with a triangular arsehole. It shits bricks, hence [the] Pyramids!

Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the tight-skinned lizard.

— The tight-skinned lizard? [Faaan-TAS-tic!!]

Yes, the tight-skinned lizard is an amazing animal. Whenever it blinks it flips itself. Someone threw pepper in its eyes, and it flogged itself to death!

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Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the rhinoceros.

— The rhinoceros? [Faaan-TAS-tic!!]

Yes, the rhinosorarse is an amazing animal. Its name comes from the ancient Greek, rhino meaning money, sorarse meaning piles. It is the richest animal in the jungle: it has piles and piles of money!

Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the oohah bird.

— The oohah bird? [Faaan-TAS-tic!!]

Yes, the oohah bird is an amazing bird. The male species lives in the North Pole, the female species lives in the South Pole. In spring they migrate, and when they meet, oooooohh — aahhhhh!

Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the elephant.

— The elephant? [Faaan-TAS-tic!!]

Yes, the elephant is an amazing animal. It eats twelve hours a day, but only shits once a week. And when it shits it ... Move away there, please, sonny ... As I was saying, it eats all the week and only shits . . . Please move away, sonny . . . And when it shits it shits! . . . Has anyone got a shovel?

Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the orangatang.

— The orangatang? [Faaan-TAS-tic!!]

Yes, the orangatang is an amazing animal. It has balls of steel, and as it swings from vine to vine through the jungle, its balls go orang-a-tang, orang-a-tang!

Here, ladies and gentlemen we have the mountain goat.

— The mountain goat? [Faaan-TAS-tic!!]

The mountain goat is an amazing animal. It farts and jumps from crag to crag, [and from precipice to precipice, and then back to piss again.] It has science baffled, as to whether the farts make it jump, or the jumps make it fart!

"Daniel in the Lions' Den," or "Cyclops," or "The Night of the King's Castration," also this latter tide mispronounced or misapprehended as "The King's Coronation." Sometimes called "King Darius," with ending: "Whereupon the king, having partaken of over-ripe olives, hied himself to the innermost part of his kingdom and proceeded to shit buttermilk for three days, and thereafter was

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known as King Dairy-Ass throughout the world." The text from which this is taken (collected in Hartford, Kentucky, 1955, w.k.f.a. ) makes quite clear that this recitation is an offshot of "The Hamburg Show" preceding, in the paragraph opening: "Now we observe Daniel in the lions' den. The lions are in the background. Daniel can be distinguished by the large green umbrella he holds in his hand." Some texts also add "and the Bible under his arm." This derives unmistakably from "Short Sketches of Bible History," in The Stag Party (1888) unnumb. pp. 216-18 which is also a form of "The Hamburg Show." Here: "There's no use pointing Dan out, because he's the only man there, nor the lion, that big ferocious baste you see in the corner snapping and grabbing all the time at the prophet's bare arse."

A modern text is printed in Immortalia (1927); and others in Folk Poems and Ballads ('Mexico City, 1945' [ed. A. Reynolds Morse, Cleveland, 1948]) pp. 57-60, one as "King Darius," but without the ending explaining the name. Two texts collected in Idaho, 1928 and 1933, are in the Kenneth Larson ms. The Western Kentucky Folklore Archive is rich in versions of this monologue, and the Indiana Folklore Archive has at least two, aside from those in the Larson MS. which is repositoried there (also in the Kinsey Library, Institute for Sex Research). Although white-culture bawdy recitations are not common among black "toasts," and vice versa, I have collected "Daniel in the Lions' Den" from an American Negro performer in Paris, 1954, who called it "The Night of the King's Cascade," but broke down almost immediately at the line: "Somebody said camel-shit, because bullshit was then unknown. . You'd have to crawl up a camel's ass and pull the hump out of his back." (That is, adding-in an "impossibility" line from another recitation, as in Roger D. Abrahams' Deep Down in the Jungle, 1964, p. 159, No. 6b; and in Bruce Jackson's Get Your Ass In the Water, 1974, "Down and Out," No. 55b: line 26.) The performer then bridged-over and swung into the standard black toast, "Signifyin' Monkey." One brief colloquy from a World War I text of Daniel" is cited as a "pseudo-recitation" in John Brophy & Eric Partridge's Songs and Slang of the British Soldier (3rd ed. London, 1931) p. 270, followed by a purified "Hamburg Show" entitled The Showman," and referred to as "a masterpiece of misguided ingenuity."

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Two fragmentary texts were reported from London, in 1952-3, with the lines: "'I'll be fucked! cried the Duchess, more in hope than in anguish. Whereupon a nearby courtier, taking her at her word, seized her by the buttocks and drew her on like a jackboot." Also: "'Shit!' said the king, and forty courtiers strained on their haunches. And the Lord said, 'Let there be light!' and there was light; you could see for fucking miles!" (An American text, collected in Kentucky, 1959, tops this with: "When the valleys and gutters were full the King called a halt, and then ten thousand loyal butt-holes snapped shut with a stately click.") A complete version was collected in London, 1956. This concentrates on the verbal competition in obscenity between the King and Daniel, who has to pay for the drinks after each of the King's bawdy repartees, except the one he wins when the King cries "Shit!" and Daniel replies "Right, first time!" (the ancient game of "selling bargains," on which see Rationale II, pages 821 and 934-6); instead of "marking up a point for the common people," as in American versions. In one of the Larson MS. texts, versified in part, the penalty seems to be showing the Queen's arse (ritual nudity, as with Lady Godiva and modern "moon-flashing") when the King loses: "Whereupon the queen dashed madly through the court with her drawers at half-mast, and her ass shining like a looking-glass in the moonlight." The following text is from a male student at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1959:

'Twas the night of the King's castration: the royal ball was coming off. Counts, discounts, and no-'counts stood around the courtyard, camel-dunging one another; for bullshit was as yet unheard-of.

Then in came Daniel, with his balls slung over his shoulder. "What ho!" cried Daniel. "Ass-hole," said the king. "Then suck it!" roared Daniel, thereby scoring a point for the common people. Now this made the king very angry, and he ordered Daniel to come forth. But Daniel slipped on a lion turd and came fifth. This made Daniel so furious that he picked up the lion turd and threw it at random; but Random ducked and it hit the king.

Now, this made the king even more angry, and so he ordered Daniel to be thrown into the den of lions. There

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was Daniel in the midst of all those roaring, snarling beasts. But of course you could easily recognize Daniel by the large green parasol which he always carried. Suddenly one of the lions seized Daniel by the left gonad. "Ouch!" creied Daniel. "It tickles." "What tickles?" asked the king. "Testicles!" roared Daniel, thereby scoring another point for the common people. Upon hearing this, all the ladies in the courtyard took out their tits and tittered.

Now this made the king exceedingly angry, and so he inquired, "Where's the queen?" "Milord, she is on the royal crapper." "And is she well supplied with paper?" "Milord, she has forty reams of the finest linen." "It is good," said the king. "And where's the princess?" "Oh, she's upstairs in bed with laryngitis." "I'll kill that fucking Greek!" cried the king. "Oh, well, fuck the princess." And fifty thousand loyal subjects were trampled in the rush, for in those days the king's word was law, and the king ruled with an iron hand. This made the king exceedingly angry, and in exasperation he cried, "Oh, shit!" And fifty thousand loyal subjects squatted and grunted in unison, for in those days the king's word was law, and the king ruled with an iron hand.

Later in the evening the king entered the royal boudoir, and beheld the queen, lying in nature's attire. "Roll over!" cried the king. "I'll be fucked if I will!" said the queen. "You'll be corn-hauled if you won't!" cried the king. Upon hearing this the queen shit a gold brick, for in those days a square ass-hole was a symbol of royalty. When the king saw this he cried, "Balls!" not because he wanted to, but because he had two. And the queen replied, "Balls? If I had two I could be king!"

The King of the Goddam Islands," or "The Bosun," or "The Sod's Opera." — This is one of the most remarkable of bawdy monologues in English, especially its ritual responses. It is discussed in my The Horn Book, pp. 95-6, tracing its origin to a bawdy farce in the style of Rochester's Sodom, by the British war-correspondent and author of much flagellant poetry, George Augustus Sala, his "New and Gorgeous Pantomine entitled Harlequin Prince Cherrytop and the Good Fairy Fairfuck, or "The Frig the

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Fuck and the Fairy" (1879; reprint [London: Smithers], 1905: copies, British Museum, Private Case; and in my own collection). In this 52-page playlet, the Russian ambassador to the Kingdom of Rogeria is Baron Tossisselfoff, and a few other of its lines and rather primitive catches and sells (in the style of "Daniel in the Lions' Den," above) are retained almost identically in the folk-recitation, which takes place instead in Bungholia. All this — or rather, a non-existent play—is often falsely attributed to Gilbert & Sullivan under the title of "The Sod's Opera!' This title is actually used by British soldiers for any kind of rough barrack-room farce, often played in part in transvestite drag. The private "Royal Nonesuch" performance in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is intended to allude to just such an obscene entertainment "for men only," in Twain's Nevada days.

The ritual element very prominent in "The King of the Goddam Islands" is also apparent in the Australian text of "The Hamburg Show" given above, where the audience replies stereotypically, "The ooligooli bird? Faaan-TAs-tic!!" or similar, after each of the opening lines, and also sings a chorus after each totem-animal's display. A correspondent in Socorro, New Mexico, June 1949, stated that he had heard "The King of the Goddam Islands" described by "an old Yale man, vintage of about 1910. In this 'spiel' as he called it, the monologuist had a number of set expressions which he taught the audience to say whenever he would mention certain of the characters in his story. The expressions were all epithets. The story concerned a whaling ship which stopped at a cannibal island. I recall just two of the epithets; indeed he may have told me only two. When 'the bos'n' was mentioned, the audience responded immediately with 'Clever bugger,' and when 'the cannibal children' were mentioned, the response was 'Cunning little abortions'." Other of the audience's responsories to the reciter's versicles are, when "the Brothers Bollox" are mentioned, "— a pair of hangers-on," and "Scrotum — the wrinkled old retainer." Also, "The Kingdom of Bungholia — the asshole of the earth!" In the first allusion to this monologue as yet discovered, in James Joyce's Ulysses (Paris, 1922) p. 208, where the scene is Dublin in 1904, the bawdy medical student Buck Mulligan, representing Joyce's friend, Dr. Oliver St.John Gogarty, proposes a playlet, "Everyman His Own Wife, or A Honeymoon in the Hand (a national immo-

Bawdy Monologues 73

rality in three orgasms) by Ballocky Mulligan," the first characters listed being: "Toby Tostoff (a ruined Pole), Crab (a bushranger), Medical Dick and Medical Davy (two birds with one stone)."

Printed texts: Untitled, begins "Then came the night of the tournament for the satisfaction of the Queen," in Morse's Folk Poems and Ballads [1948] p. 115; and "The Goddam Isles," in Snatches & Lays "by Sebastian Hogbotel and Simon ffuckes" [ed. Ian Turner, Australia, 1962, mimeographed], printed ed., Melbourne: Sun Books / Macmillan (1973) p. 81, ending with a mock anthem or chorus: "Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the seas, Britons never, never, never, shit green peas." In a text of "Daniel in the Lions' Den" orally collected in London, 1956, in which Daniel's offense is that "he did write 'assholes' across the shield of the king," a stanza or paragraph from the present recitation is mixed in, describing the king's court as including: "his two daughters, Phyllis and Syphillis; the three brothers O'Rea — Dia, Pye, and Gonnor; Ticulus and Testiculus, two hangers-on at court; Umbellicus, an old naval gentleman; Count Tossoffsky, a ruined Pole; Scrotum, a wrinkled retainer; the Chancellor Penis, an upright man; a chorus of virgins, playing on their Fallopian tubes; and a host of discharged seamen." A nasty pre-psychotic literary fantasy on these themes was sent me from Batangas, Philippine Islands, 1945, by an anonymous correspondent, beginning: "The wind blew and the shit flew and the tird heads were sticking their penises in the cunts of the pussy willows. Thence Dead-Eye Dick mounted the throne." It continues with dyspemistic oral defilings of the fortunately rare type cited in Rationale II. 413-14—not recommended reading — and ends: "Any prick who reads this is a nosey son-of-a-bitch and his soul is condemned to hell. (signed) Jack-the-Ripper." The following text was recited by a young Canadian army dentist in New York, 1944: learned in Gander, Newfoundland.

Sir Henry, the Bos'n, and I were sailing in the South Pacific when we were wrecked on the Goddam Islands. We struck a rock. Said I to Lord Bill, "By Christ, we have and all"—but we got ashore somehow and the Bos'n, clever bugger that he was, he paddled ashore in a latrine bucket.

And there we met the King of the Goddam Islands, the

74 G. Legman

genial old sod; his guest, Richard the Turd, King Shit; his wife Bloody Bitch, and his two sons-in-law, Knockers and Hangers-On (left one lowest); his two sons, Prepuce and Prostate, mutual masturbators; and his two daughters, Syphillis and Gonorrhea, affable debauchees; his two nieces, Urena and Urina, as alike as two peas; and Clitoris, the young pretender; Claude Balls and his Merry Swingers with Jock Strap's Elastic Band; while Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer, hung around at a respectful distance from the Venereal Royalty with a watchful eye on all the cunts, concubines and connubial comforts, and the whole population of the Goddam Islands, buggering shits.

The Witch Doctor, titivating his penis to an unprecedented height, proceeded to balance thereon one army hut collapsible, one telegraph pole, one roll of barbed wire, one pack of playing cards, one bar of Sunlight soap to keep the party clean, one packet of W. D. and H. O. Wills' cigarettes (the only brand available at the time in the island), and thereupon proceeded to walk around the arena thirty-three and one-third times, to the intense amazement of the King of the Goddam Islands.

But the Bos'n, clever bugger that he was, began to titivate up his penis to an unprecedented height even in these parts, and proceeded to balance thereon: one Witch Doctor and one army hut collapsible, one telegraph pole, one roll of barbed wire, one pack of playing cards, one bar of Sunlight soap to keep the party clean, and one packet of W. D. and H. O. Wills' cigarettes (the only brand), and thereupon proceeded to waltz around the arena thirty-three and two-third times, to the intense amazement of the King of the Goddam Islands, the genial old sod; his guest, Richard the Turd, King Shit; his wife Bloody Bitch, and his two sons-in-law, Knockers and Hangers-On (left one lowest); his two sons, Prepuce and Prostate, mutual masturbators; and his two daughters, Sy-phillis and Gonorrhea, affable debauchees; his two nieces Urene and Urina, as alike as two peas; and Clitoris, the young pretender; Claude Balls and his Merry Swingers with Jock Strap's Elastic Band; not forgetting Scrotum, the wrinkled old retainer; to the everlasting glory

Bawdy Monologues 75

of the British Merchant Marine — rah, rah, rah! [Reciter snaps into rigid military salute, and sings in barking voice:]

Hail, Britannia! Britannia waives the rules, Britons never, never, never, whank—their—tools!

II. MOCK SPEECHES AND COMPLAINTS

"Lt. Rudder Meets the Press." — Unpublished, though an inferior text updating matters from World War II to the Korean War is given in the Smegmafax supplement to Lt. William J. Starr's The Fighter Pilot's Hymn Book (Cannon, New Mexico, 1958, hektographed: copy G. Legman), the most extensive and probably the best of the U.S. airforce private song-folios. A 78 r.p.m. phonograph recording of the present piece circulated briefly about 1946. Compare, for a similar exploitation of straight-from-the-shoulder, no-bullshit military prose, General George S. Patton's "Farewell Address to his Troops," authentically delivered by the general on June 5th, 1944, the day before the Allied invasion of Europe, as printed with varying degrees of expurgation in: John O'Donnell's column, "Capitol Stuff," in the New York Daily News (May 31, 1945) p. 4; in Dwight Macdonald's magazine Politics (August 1945) ii. 226-7, reprinted in Macdonald's book, The Responsibility of Peoples (London, 1967); and as "Draughts of Old Bourbon," in the New American Mercury (Jan. 1951) pp. 127-8, "with only the four-letter words deleted," but announcing an unexpurgated phonograph recording in preparation, with an actor imitating Patton's voice and manner in tough-talking profanity.

Of particular interest in "Lt. Rudder Meets the Press" is the dialogue form, in which one person takes both or all parts, using different voices. This is seen much earlier in the famous chanted song of the night-visit, "Bollocky Bill the Sailor," on which see The Horn Book, pp. 201-2 and 225. It is still current in the melodramatic burlesque, "Pay the Rent!" in which the reciter takes three voices, further identified for the audience by means of a black bowtie, which is held up at necktie-level, as a moustache, and as a hair-ribbon, to represent the hero, the villain, and the girl. Three extraordinary bawdy recitations, each also involving two voices (usually woman and man) are printed in Rationale II. 391; also

76 G. Legman

711-12, "Sporting-Woman and Cowboy;" and 885-6, on the Irish landlady whose boarder bets five shillings with her that she can't "fart a feather off the tip of his manhood, two tries out of three.'' The present text was collected in New York, 1945, as a typewritten sheet, from a young woman who had been given it by a serviceman. Compare the novel, Shore Leave (1944) by Frederick Wakeman, offering a much tamer version of the problems of the airforce hero on leave.

[An interview between Lt. (jg) Rudder, of VB127, who has just returned from the Pacific war zone, the press, and Eager Cmdr. Beaver, of Navy Public Relations:]

peess: Welcome home, Lt. Rudder. How do you feel about being back in the States again?
jaygee: Pretty pissed off.
cmdr (to press): Lt. Rudder's eyes were misty as the outline of the Statute of Liberty, symbol of American faith and the Fight for Liberty, loomed into sight.
press: What's the first thing you're going to do in New York, Lieutenant?
jaygee: Get laid.
cmdr: He intends to fly back to his old home immediately, and see his Mom and all the folks.
press: Are they going to give you the Congressional Medal of Honor?
jaygee: They fuckin well should.
cmdr: Lt. Rudder modestly disclaims any high awards. "Every man in the squadron deserves it as much as I," the Ace said.
press: What about the case of champagne Admiral Fantail was going to give you for sinking those subs?
jaygee: Aw, the bastard crapped out on me.
cmdr: Lt. Rudder does not drink or smoke. The price of a case was generously donated to the Russian relief, at his suggestion.
press: How did you sink three subs with only two depth charges?
jaygee: I guess I'm a pretty hot fuckin pilot.

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cmdr: Bashfully, Rudder attributes all his success to a combination of teamwork, luck, and superior equipment.
press: Do you think the Army pilot is as good as the Naval aviator?
jaygee: I can fly circles up their ass.
cmdr. The Lieutenant pays high tribute to the flying skill of the Army.
press: What about the French?
jaygee: Those shit heads? They don't know their ass from third base.
cmdr: What the Lieutenant means is that the quality of the French airmen is fully equal to ours.
press: What about your ground crew, are they pretty good?
jaygee: Those dumb sons-of-bitches have always got their heads up their ass. It was a miracle I ever got off the ground.
cmdr: Rudder is lavish in his praise of the ground crews who work day and night to Keep Them Flying.
press: And how about your combat air-crewmen?
jaygee: They were strictly scotch-and-crotch men. Fucked off the rest of the time.
cmdr: He means that air-crewmen Have What It Takes.
press: We understand that you intend to visit the factory that made your Ventura.
jaygee: Yeah, if the bastards aren't out on strike. I'd like to get my hands on the broad that welded her lipstick into the pee tube.
cmdr: He is proud of our American workers and the magnifi-
cent Job they are Doing to Back the Attack.
press: We understand that you'd like to teach anti-sub warfare awhile before going back.
jaygee: Yeah, somebody's got to give the kids the ungarbled
word. The stuff they taught me in training nearly got my ass shot off.
cmdr: The Lieutenant is unqualified in his praise of the high
degree of training given our fledgling pilots.
jaygee: Sorry, boys, I got to get out of here and line up a piece of ass before the bars close. So long.
cmdr: Yes, Lt. Rudder can't wait to get back to his mother's

78 G. Legman

apple pie, the girl he left behind, and the Main Street where he played Indian.

"Address of a Lady Political Leader." — Dates from at least the 1920's, possibly earlier, and is of British origin, in mockery of the Suffragette movement which demanded the vote for women. Lady Asquith, credited in the version below, was active about the time of World War I. Other versions credit Lady Nancy Astor, an American, who was the first woman to sit in the British Parliament (but only because she succeeded her husband in the House of Commons, when he was made a viscount and was promoted to the House of Lords). American texts are later, and generally refer to an unnamed "leading woman columnist," obviously meaning either Dorothy Thompson, wife of the novelist Sinclair Lewis, or Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the President. The burlesque attack on the early Feminists, stemming of course from the French Revolution, appears first in the grotesque medals struck in France, as noted in M. P. Allut's Aloysia Sygea et Nicolas Chorier (Lyon, 1862) pp. 5 and 63-4; copy, Ohio State Univ., Legman Collection. The burlesquing of parliamentarian terms dates from the English Revolution in the 1640's, in many pieces in rhyme mocking Cromwell and the Roundheads, as gathered in the Royalist drollery, Ratts Rhimed to Death, or The Rump-Parliament Hang'd up in the Shambles (1660), reissued as The Rump (1662, and reprs. 1731 and 1872), and others similar.

The present mock speech was apparently printed only as a single-sheet (about 1930), and circulates in typewriting or hektograph more often than orally. Published in the first and largest of the British army private song-folios, the very rare Camp Fire Songs and Verse, "collected by a Well Known Cavalry Regiment" (Madras, India [ca. 1939], mimeographed; copy, G. Legman) f. 55, as "Report of a Speech by Mrs. Pankhurst — the Suffragette," who died in 1928. This ends with an extra tag-line, not in most texts: "The meeting here broke up in great disorder owing to the man at the back being relieved of his horn by a lady attendant." All American versions give the mock-Feminist motto at the end as "Up with the Petticoats and Down with the Pants!" (not "trousers"). An abbreviated text omitting this, but giving the French "Vive la difference!" line instead, is printed in Harry Morgan's More Rugby Songs (London, 1968) pp. 59-60, expurgated against lčse-majesté as "Lady P*ankh*rst*s Speech."

Bawdy Monologues 79

Excerpts from the Address of Lady Asquith to the Women's Club of Southwick, and the Women's Political Partisan League of London. Special to the London Times.

We must have what the men have. It may not be much, but we mean to have it, no matter how large or how small it may be. If we cannot have it without friction, then we shall have it with friction. (Applause.) If we cannot have it through our organizations we shall have it through our combinations, or without them if necessary. (Cheers.) But we absolutely refuse to be poked on the floor of the House. (Prolonged applause.)

We are willing to look up to the men above, but we do not want to be forced or held down without being able to make a few motions of our own. We women want to hold up our end and show the men our possibilities whenever anything arises that will fill our expectations. We women are deeply interested in good movements, and we will always accept any load that is given to us. (Cheers.) Nothing that comes up will be too hard for us. (Wild cheers.)

We are willing to work under the men above us, now as in the past, and to the point of exhaustion if need be (Applause. ) But we are becoming disgusted with their failures and shortcomings! (Hissing and booes.) Never when anything arose and required our attention have we failed to come, and we shall come again and again if the occasion presents itself. But too often has our enthusiasm been aroused with false promises, and too often have our hopes and strivings been met with feeble performances that have left us disappointed and dissatisfied. (Cries of "Hear, hear!") That drunken loafer says "Down with the Petticoats!" How often have our efforts to push forward our ends met in the House with the cry of "Down with the Petticoats!" Now I say, "Up with the Petticoats and Down with the Trousers!" Then and only then will matters be seen in their true light. (Wild applause.)

As long as we women are split up as we are, the men will always be on top.

"The Midnight Handicap," or "Santa Anita Pushover." — Unpublished except in single-sheet form, about 1940. Circulates more

80 G. Legman

often in typewriting or mimeograph than orally, my last date of collection being 1952. A similar British item, "Latest Sporting News: Results of the Whoring Handicap," was collected first in 1945 but is probably the original form, ending: "They came in in the following order: Syphilis first, Chancre second, Bubo third, and Suppuration a bad fourth . . . Testicle pulled up much distressed. Capsules bolted. Arsehole was scratched. Gonorrhea is still running." A text briefer than that given below is printed in Alan Dundes & Carl R. Pagter's Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire (American Folklore Society, 1975) pp. 203-05, as "The Seventh Race."

Another such item, describing a game competition in sexual terms, is "An International Match," found only in Be Pure! (Perth, Australia, 1963: mimeographed) p. 48. This is a lively description of a cricket match in which "the Hon. John Everhard brought over a team of Old Bastardians" to play the local ladies' team headed by "Poppet Tupper and Miss Ophelia Twott. . . The match was a draw and the President, Lady Cumwell, says she would like a return match with the ladies on top next time." Some of the most elaborate metaphorical pieces of this kind in English are centuries old, and concerned with sea- and land-battles to allow a maximum of male-dominant ordnance metaphors. As example, "The Fireship" (about 1690, preserved in the Pepys Ballads, ed. Rollins, 1931, VI. 153-5), on which see further The Horn Book, pp. 189-90; and "A Ballad on the Rape of Bergen-op-Zoom," in The Foundling Hospital for Wit (1748) Part v: pp. 11-13.

The present recitation is the apparent source — with overtones of the similar "Great Farting Competition" — of the "Olympic Sex Games" skit, commented in breathless sports-announcer style in Ken Shapiro's movie satire on television, The Groove Tube (1975), which is the high-point of the film. The following text was collected in New York, in 1941. It was delivered with great animation, as though by a sports announcer, the list of "horses" being read off first into the imaginary microphone from a prepared slip of paper. (Note: "Merry Widow" is a now passe slang term and brand name for a condom.)

The Midnight Handicap: 7th Race. Broadcast over the Natural Network. Entries and Morning Line Odds:

Bawdy Monologues 81

Passionate Ecstasy 2 to 1 Merry Widow 5 to 1

Bare Belly 3 to 1 Jockey Shorts 3 to 1

Conscience 200 to 1 Silk Panties 2 to 1

Heaving Bosom 8 to 1 Clean Sheets 100 to 1

Pussy 10 to 1 Thighs 10 to 1

Big Dick 2 to 1

Eligible: 15 years old and up. Weather: Sticky.
Track: Soft and spongy.

They're off!! Pussy was scratched and Conscience was left at the post. Silk Panties and Jockey Shorts are off with a rush. Bare Belly Shows. Heaving Bosom is being pressed. Merry Widow is caught between Thighs and Big Dick. Clean Sheets is under the pack.

At the half! — It's Bare Belly on top. Thighs opens up a big hole and Big Dick is showing signs of life. Heaving Bosom is still being hard pressed. Passionate Ecstasy is coming up. — Around the far turn, it's Merry Widow between Big Dick and Passionate Ecstasy. Thighs working hard, and Bare Belly is under pressure.

Into the stretch! — Merry Widow cracks under the strain. Big Dick is starting to drive. Passionate Ecstasy is having trouble keeping her head. Bare Belly is close up. It's Big Dick and Passionate Ecstasy head and head, but Big Dick is driving hard. It's Big Dick over Passionate Ecstasy! No, it's Big Dick and Passionate Ecstasy nose to nose and tail to tail.

And here they come down the line to the finish. — A terrific drive! Thighs can be seen coming up. Bare Belly falls back. Heaving Bosom is exhausted. Clean Sheets is wet with sweat. Thighs pulling up. Big Dick wins by a last hard drive!

What a race, folks! Wait a minute and we'll have the results for you. Big Dick came in first. Thighs place. Passionate Ecstasy shows. Just a minute, folks. Something's happening down there. What do you know?! Big Dick won by a head but went limp and fell right at the finish! — This is the Natural Broadcasting Company.

"Shy-kimps," or "Oysters Is Amorous."—Given only in Snatches

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& Lays (Australia, 1962; ed. 1973) p. 76. A joke very much in the line of this "complaint" is current at present in America, but arrives at the opposite conclusion. Two women are comparing husbands. One husband is terribly considerate. When he comes home late at night he takes off his shoes and clothes, and creeps into bed so quietly his wife doesn't even know he's there. "Hoohhah!" says the other woman. "You call that a husband? Phooey on such a husband! When my Meyer comes home late he drops his shoes on the floor with a crash! He pulls off his clothes, and flings them all over the place. And then he throws back the covers and slaps me on the bare ass, and he says, 'All right, Becky, how's about it?!'" — Told by a Jewish publisher, New York, 1953; also with the mock-elegant ending, almost identically with the present monologue: "Now then, Mrs. Ginsberg, if you please!"

A version of the joke from Denmark is given in Patrick M. McGrady's The Love Doctors (New York, 1972) p. 228, not forgetting the slap, and explaining that the husband's real purpose is not to make love to his wife but to prevent her from asking where he has been. Compare also the recitation about the Irish landlady and the cunning boarder who inveigles her into trying to "fart this feather off the tip of my manhood, two tries out of three," given in Rationale II. 885-6, as marvellously told by an Irish folksinger in La Jolla, Calif., 1965. He told his story strictly as a performance, with changes of voice representing the speakers; arm- and body-motions suited to the action, &c. The present monologue is doubtless to be delivered in the same way, but obviously with pretended repugnance.

Oysters is amorous, lobsters is lecherous, but shy-rimps is the most lascivious of all fish.

When my 'usband comes 'ome with a bellyful of the narsty creatures, Mrs. 'Awkins, I says to meself, there'll be trouble— an' sure enough, there is.

No sooner 'ave we been in bed five minutes when 'e says, Mrs. H., your cunt IF you please.

Whereupon, 'aving vented 'isself no less than seventeen times upon my unfortunate person, 'e lays back exhausted. But not for long.

Barely another five minutes 'ave gone by when 'e turns to me and 'e says Liza, 'e says, 'ow about a bit? Not on your

Bawdy Monologues 83

life, says I, clapping my 'and to the offended part, and turning me face to the wall.

Whereupon, with one mighty wave of 'is muscular forearm, 'e throws back the bedclothes and tosses 'isself off upon the ceiling.

And there, all night long, 'arf a noggin of 'is narsty nature goes dy-rip, dy-rip, dy-rip, all over my new linoleum, and I don't get a wink of sleep all night.

Compare with this the rhymed recitation given in Camp Fire Songs and Verse [Madras, ca. 1939] f. 31, as "Sam at Home (with apologies to Stanley Holloway)," a British music-hall dialect entertainer:

Pick up thi' skirt to thi' waist, lass,
And pull down thi' knickers as well.
Summat's going t'happen to thee, lass,
'Cos, organ's beginning to swell.

She looked at old Sam in amazement,
In fact in a kind of a 'uff.
Eh — nowt's going t'happen to me, lad,
'Cos touch-hole's all bunged up wi' fluff.

"The Debtor Letter," or "Hard Luck Story."—This masterpiece of folk speech and sado-masochistic humor is apparently not American in origin, as the earliest known text is given in the British army bawdy song-folio, Camp Fire Songs and Verse [Madras, India, ca. 1939] f. 53, there being addressed to a debt collection company in Melbourne, Australia, with the dates 1904 and 1906 in the text. The American versions, of which Dr. Alan Dundes has collected at least three since 1960, and I have found eight, beginning in Washington, D.C., 1945 (the text given below), almost always circulate as a "handwrit" or typewritten letter, though it is an evident private or internal monologue in the style of Cyrano de Bergerac and of Molly Bloom in the last chapter of Joyce's Ulysses. Two excellent texts are printed in Dundes & Pagter's Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire (1975) pp. 26-31.

84 G. Legman

All recovered texts show the typical variation of folk transmission, especially in the "delicate wildcat operation," as Dr. Dundes phrases it. Where the American versions use a poker, a straw, a toothpick, a warm rake-handle and a red-hot awl, the Australian original (?) in Camp Fire Songs and Verse states plainly: "I tell yer right here now that yer have as much chance of getting money out of me as yer have poking two pounds of melted butter up a wild cat's arseole with a lady's red hot hair pin. Yer say yer must have some cash. Well I tell yer that if turkeys was 6d each, I couldn't buy a tomtit's arseole." American texts vary this last to: "I swear to God mister, that if fat geese were selling for 1˘ a piece, I couldn't kiss a humming bird's ass." Also, less poetically, "At the present time if it cost a nickel to shit, I'd have to puke." (This is the only line ever expurgated, usually to "vomit," and in one case to "throw up." — New York, 1957.)

Part of the enlargement of the American versions is done by means of anti-Negro asides ("heavy hung nigger" or "blue-gum nigger") and anti-Jewish allusions ("an inebriated circumcized son-of-a-bitch of a peddler," who starves a horse to death); and in particular by adding-in standard oldtime jokes or humorous tags. For example, one of Dr. Dundes' texts, collected in 1961, adds: "P.S. If I wasn't the Pastor of our little town, I'd really tell you what I think." While the Australian form ends even more sardonically: "Fuk the whole lot of yer I say, yer a scurvy lot of buggers. — Yrs respectfully, Josiah Hawkins." The final taunt or dare, about "making trouble" for the writer, which he states is now impossible, alludes to a famous joke given in Rationale II. 986, under "All to Shit," as recorded about 1910. The shotgun method of giving the young wife an orgasm is also printed in the full joke-form in Rationale II. 975-6, the result always being that the farmer castrates himself and everyone else, at least symbolically. As to the wife, one of Dr. Dundes' texts adds to the catastrophe, as described in the joke-form and below, the cold anti-breast touch: "I bit the nipple off her tit." And he observes significantly that, "The plight of the debtor is heightened by the theme of sexual impotence in the letter. The castration of males (including bulls) is in contrast with the manifest sexual promiscuity of the writer's daughter and wife." Or perhaps one is the result of the other.

Bawdy Monologues 85

Gentlemen:

Your super-heated letter came to hand this morning in an open envelope with a one cent stamp on it, and it would have given me and the boys at the office much pleasure and amusement, had not the melancholy reflection come with it that there were shysters in the country that have the guts to dun an American in an open envelope with a one cent stamp on it.

You speak of honor. If you were an honorable credit manager you know whereof I speak when I say that if there was an honorable credit manager in the world, he would have run around crying for shame. You say you thought the bill should have been paid long ago and could not understand why it was not. I'll enlighten you.

In 1906 I bought a saw-mill on credit, in 1908 an ox team, timber cart, two ponies, a breech-loading shotgun, a wine tester, a five dollar Colt revolver, two fine razor back hogs and a set of books, all on the unchristly credit plan. In 1909 the mill burned down and didn't leave a damned thing. One of my ponies died and I loaned the other one to a son-of-a-bitch peddler that starved him to death. Then I joined the church, the Populist Party, and a Farmers Alliance, and was beaten for constable by one vote.

In 1910 my father died and my brothers were lynched for horse stealing. A railroad man knocked my sister up and I had to pay $88 to a doctor to keep the little bastard from being a relative of mine. In 1911 my boy had the mumps and they went down on him and the doctor had to castrate him to save his life. Later I went fishing and the boat upturned and I lost the biggest catfish I ever saw and two of my sons drowned, neither of them being the one that was castrated.

In 1912 I burned out again and took to drinking. I didn't stop until I had nothing left but a Waterbury watch and kidney trouble. For some time I was kept busy between winding my watch and pissing. In 1915 my wife ran away with a heavy hung nigger and left me with a pair of twins for souverniers. Then later, I married the hired girl to cut down expenses. I had a lot of trouble getting her to go off

86 G. Legman

so I went to the doctor, and he told me to do something to scare her about the time I thought she was ready. I took my shotgun to bed with me one night and when I thought that she was ready, I stuck it out the window and fired it off. Well she shit in bed, I ruptured myself and shot the best damn cow I had.

The next year I took heart to myself and bought a manure spreader, a Deere tractor and a thrashing machine. Then came a cyclone and blew everything all over the next county. Then my wife caught the clapp from a travelling salesman, my son wiped his ass on a corn cob that had rat poison on it and someone nutted my bull.

Nothing surprised me more than when you said you could cause me trouble. Now if you can see where I missed any trouble, for Christ's sake dig in. I tell you mister, getting money out of me would be like trying to poke butter in a wild cat's ass with a red hot poker. At the present time if it cost a nickel to shit, I'd have to puke. I am praying for a storm of skunk shit and I hope that storm centers around a particular bunch of bastards who get their mail at St. Louis.

III. RHYMED RECITATIONS

Monologues in verse and rhymed recitations are enormously more common than those in prose at the erotic level, and represent a third or more of all the bawdy poetic materials (including ballads and songs) folk-collected, especially in cities. Very often these are also circulated, as are prose obscśna, in manuscript and nowadays in typewritten, mimeographed or photocopy form. In earlier decades, but now infrequently, they circulated as subterranean chap-printed slips or broadsides, not issued commercially but as a private entertainment in small printing-offices. These ephemeral but non-oral presentations are evidently the form from which certain tellers commit the texts to memory for performance later. The repertory is so large in English that only a few examples can be given below to mark the form. The largest collection other than my own archive is that of Vance Randolph, included in his "Unprintable" Songs from the Ozarks ( ms. 1949 and 1954), now scheduled at last for publication.

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The principal type of modern rhymed recitation, which is also generally bawdy, is the endemic English-language verse form, the limerick, of which I have published a collection of about eighteen hundred unexpurgated examples, arranged by subjects, dating from 1870 to 1952. (The Limerick, Paris, 1953, and reprints.) An even larger supplement, of 2600 further modern examples since that date, has not yet been published. The history, psychology, and technique of folk presentation of limericks is discussed in my long introduction to the New York, 1970, edition of The Limerick. It should be noted here that limericks are not only recited but are often sung or chanted, as though a consecutive song, each limerick-stanza being offered by a different singer in "communal improvisation" style (though actually delivered from memory), with an encouraging chorus by the participating audience.

Tremendous amounts of sub-literary poetic doggerel, ranging from offcolor to luridly pornographic, were printed in English from the late 18th century to the present, first principally in England but later mostly in America, in the form of private songsters and joke-books for the use of men's drinking clubs, now the private mimeographica of college or airforce beer-busts. A few, but only a very few, of the rhymed recitations still current in America date from these early British "coal-hole" and "cider-cellar" songsters, which are discussed in some detail in my The Horn Book (1964) pp. 20-21, 195-8, and 379-84, showing their relation to the later music-halls. See also the titles listed in Frank Hoffmann's Analytical Survey of Anglo-American Traditional Erotica (1973) pp. 46-9, 132-5, and 145-9. One such surviving recitation is "That Little Piece of Whang" (printed in Morse's Folk Poems and Ballads [1948] p. 39), originally a 16th-century French folktale, "Le Lacet," of which the earliest text in English seems to be "Man's Bit of Thread," about 1820, credited to the theatre-writer, Tom Dibdin, in Captain Morris' Songster (ca. 1830). See Rationale II. 510, for the earlier French sources.

A rhymed recitation or folk-poem is often a sort of folksong in abeyance, just waiting for someone to set it to a tune. A large percentage of such poems, in fact, are purposely written to meters that will fit certain favorite tunes, and many therefore spring rapidly into currency as conscious song-parodies. Some even drive out their originals, and are eventually thought of simply as the words

88 G. Legman

that go with these tunes. This has been going on for centuries. After all, what is a song but a poem set to music? Like the chicken and the egg, it does not much matter which comes first; the activity is continuous and cyclic. One thing is certain: the audience cares most about the words. For some remarkable examples of the protean changes of song-texts, while retaining the tunes over centuries of transmission, see Dr. Claude M. Simpson's The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (Rutgers University Press, 1966).

The opposite motion is also known to occur, of a song that loses its tune or wears it down to musical inacceptability, and become a recitation. Bruce Jackson gives as a "toast," in Get Your Ass In the Water (1974) No. 73, "I Woke Up This Morning With a Hardon," which has lived as a folksong at least since 1640, when it appeared in Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript as "A Dainty Ducke," later entitled "A Knave Is a Knave" and "A Guy Is a Guy." Another strain of this same song became the cowboy favorite, "The Old Chisholm Trail." In the black subculture it has now become a "toast" without tune. Its standard tune is admittedly very trite. Anyone who has had to sit through a session of endless limericks, chanted rather than sung to a worn-out approximation of the "Spanish Nobilio" tune, will understand what is involved here. This is a problem shared by many folksongs — that of poor or worn-down tunes — though the usual solution is to "bridge over," and appropriate some fresher and better tune from another song. The ugly sadistic recitation, "The Great Wheel" or "Great Fucking Wheel" (discussed at length in Rationale II. 473-4, and 655) has had at least three hymn-tunes that I know of adapted to its heavy mechanical beat, yet it remains basically only a recitation or chant.

Sadistic rhymed recitations of this kind are a special genre and unfortunately very popular among men. They almost always involve epic contests in sexual intercourse, in which the woman (less often the man) is destroyed. These include two very long British imitations of "Our Lil": one called "Eskimo Nell" (in Snatches & Lays [Australia, 1962] ed. 1973, pp. 77-80, and in other sources), and the other "Samari Sal" ( in Be Pure! a college mimeographicum made at Perth, Australia, 1963). Perhaps the earliest such item — and just as ugly and just as long—is "The Great Plenipotentiary" by Capt. Charles Morris, dating from the 1780's (see The Horn Book, pp. 198-9). This is reprinted in most editions of the non-

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Burnsian Merry Muses from 1832 until as recently as 1964. Frank Hoffmann states in his Analytical Survey, p. 135, that it is "still widely sung on college campuses," but there may be some confusion here. Eugene Field's "A French Crisis" or "The Fair Limousin" (in The Stag Party, 1888, unnumb. pp. 231-4; reprinted in Immortalia, 1927) ends very much in this vein of the "sadistic concept of coitus." It redeems itself by the fantastically extensive slang synonymies for the sexual parts and acts which Field works into his lines and rhymes. This is a real tour de force, produced without access to the first serious such synonymies in English, in John S. Farmer & William Ernest Henley's Slang and Its Analogues (1890-1909), seven volumes and revised vol. I.

An important group of recited poems and songs involves the erotization of men's work and daily milieux. Various professions such as that of soldier, sailor, tinker, miner, and the like are thus made subjects of pleasure to the audience of men involved, by being expressed in long series of double-entendres combining the acts, objects, and special terminology of the men's work with the penis, the testicles, the parts of a woman's body and the sexual enjoyment of her. Poems like these (discussed in The Horn Book, pp. 189-91) are centuries old, particularly those on the warlike "ordnance metaphors;" and many will be found in the drolleries and poetic miscellanies of the 17th century and since, particularly in Pills to Purge Melancholy (1699-1720) edited by John Playford & Thomas Durfey, and the earlier similar Musarum Delicić (1655) edited by Sir John Mennis & Dr. James Smith. The same compilers' Wit and Drollery (eds. 1661 and 1682) is also outstandingly bawdy.

Austin Fife heard such a recitation, in prose, given by the master-of-ceremonies, as a pretended radio commentator at the microphone, in a musical review to entertain the U.S. airforces in New Caledonia, South Pacific, 1943, concerning "Opening Up a New Front in Florence" and ending broadly: "Then, if we feel so inclined, we can attack Mussolini in the rear." (Illustrated as a gag-cartoon in the sex-humor magazine, Sex to Sexty, Arlington, Texas, 1975, No. 64: p. 39.) Minor genres include comedy-dialect recitations; a number of these are printed in the extremely rare Civil War bawdy songster, The Rakish Rhymer (ca. 1865), mostly in mock-German dialect. (This was reprinted, "Lutetia' [Paris: Carrington], 1917: copy, Brown Univ.) Only a few such bawdy dialect pieces

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have survived in circulation: "De Skonk I Hunt," in French-Canadian dialect, which opens Immortalia (1927); and "Dot Leedle Fur Cap," in mock-German, first printed in The Stag Party (1888) unnumb. p. 55, and several times since as a single-sheet, entitled "Der Nite B4 Xmas;" also a few cornedy-Irish dialect complaints.

Almost all bawdy recitations, in particular those of the violent action-type such as "Our Lil" (on which see further The Horn Book, pp. 417-20), are usually delivered by the reciters with considerable dramatic emphasis, almost like a chant, though at the same time kept rolling out in an insistent rhythm, probably a rather ancient style of delivery. This clearly suggests motion in the direction of formal song, as with the ancient and still-surviving Jewish neumes or cantillary figure-notations (see Ecclesiasticus, 44:5) from which Gregorian chant and plainsong developed. Often there is accompanying pantomime, and armor body-gestures such as pretending to spit tobacco juice, at the narrative pauses; and various dialect effects, in particular an exaggerated cowboy whine. (This last is also used in certain songs, such as "The Ring-Dang-Do," with hilarious effect.) An Irish folksinger travelling in California in 1965 gave in this way a rousing private rendition of "The Ancient Auld Irish French Letter of Brian Boru," of which a text is given as a song in Snatches & Lays (ed. 1973) p. 65, to the tune of "Mush, Mush, or Men of the West." A different and less Australianized text is printed in Harry Morgan's More Rugby Songs (London, 1968) p. 150, not indicating any tune.

As observed earlier, many such recitations and folk-poems have a clear satirical or even didactic intention. For example, the charming "That Portion of a Woman" (in Morse, p. 64), reliably attributed to A. P. Herbert in the 1930's; and many of the long erotic recitations in verse by Eugene Field, printed in The Stag Party [Boston? 1888] probably for the Papyrus Club, before which they were delivered. (Most, but not all of these Fieldiana are reprinted in Immortalia, 1927, which also attributes to Field a full text of "Our Lil," under the title "Lady Lil," no doubt correctly.) One such rhymed recitation about which I am able to speak with certainty is "The Great Australian Adjective," also called "The Cowboy," of which texts slyly expurgated by substitution throughout of dashes or of the word "bloody," and truncated of the final punchline stanza (!) appear in "Edgar A. Palmer's [Erich Posselt's]

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G. I. Songs (1944) pp. 207-8, and in William Wallrich's Air Force Airs (1957) pp. 160-61, erroneously calling it a "Korean War parody."

Actually, as noted further in Rationale II. 698, this is an adaptation of W. T. Goodge's famous Australian cursing poem, "Bloody!" and satirizes the overuse by American soldiers in World War II of the word "fuckin'" (really the obsolete past participle, "fucken," as in "bitchen," "rotten," "broken," etc.) as adjective-of-all-work. This had been picked up one war earlier from the Australian troops in France, who won the final battle of the war under Lt. Gen. Sir John Monash. Their ornamental, interruptive, and "infixed" forms of the same word are first noted in a World War I jokebook, Some Yarns (Paris, 1918) p. 33, where an Australian officer is quoted thus: "Oh! the bloody shell, shouted our indignant friend. It has broken my damned razor in fucking twos!!! — Well, I call that jolly fine swearing! In fact it is swearing raised to a [fucking] Art!!!" In identical style, "The Great Australian Adjective" uses the word "fuckin'" at least once in every line, running through most of the possible infixed combinations, such as "inde-fuckin'-pendent" and "abso-fuckin'-lutely;" and ends, followed by the initials of the author's nom-de-guerre and the date:

Well, fuck me till I'm fuckin dead!
He stole her fuckin' maidenhead,
And there with all his fuckin' force
Had sexual-fuckin'-intercourse!

R. M. de La Fuckin' G.
19-fuckin'-43.

Many more genres exist, among bawdy recitations, than space can be taken here to discuss, for example anti-family themes, on which see the rather full treatment in Rationale II. 728-30. Scatologica are not common, as is also the case among folksongs. The most famous such recitation is "The Great Farting Contest at Shitton-on-Pease," of British origin though known in America, and appearing first in Camp Fire Songs and Verse [Madras, ca. 1939] f. 56, from which it is reprinted verbatim in Harry Morgan's More Rugby Songs (1968) pp. 14-16. In this, women do the competing. There is also a much superior prose "Farting Competition," be-

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tween the English and Australian champions, done as a phonograph recording in Canada, about 1945, in the character of a sports announcer, with all the expected sound-effects, especially the climactic "flutterblast," as is discussed further in Rationale II. 873. This is a type of recitation that cannot be reproduced in print.

A small amount of light humorous verse, but in the bawdy vein, is still produced from time to time, obviously by educated poets, as was very common in the 17th and 18th centuries, until the growing moral repression in England finally became almost absolute at the literary level in the early 19th century. Modern animal pieces of this kind include "The Boastful Yak" (by "Henri Nicolai"), "The Camel and the Sphinx," with its elaborate pun on "the Sphinx's inscrewtable smile;" and the similar "The Arse of the Hedgehog" (given by Morse, p. 92, but without its reply), of which the earliest text I have found is in T. H. Harrisson's somewhat eccentric Letter to Oxford (The Hate Press, 1933) p. 27, in which it purportedly demonstrates that "Some of the flashest perverts in the world learnt their stuff at Ox[ford]." Compositions of this type are circulated principally as poems. I have never heard any of them given as viva-voce recitations except "The Portion of a Woman," though this may sometimes occur in the usual rhymed-toast swapping sessions.

Aside from the imitations of Edgar Allan Poe ("The Raven Maniac"), the obscene alphabets, the puerile poems about piddling pups and pooping cats and skunks, and other minor genres hardly worth discussing, large numbers of rhymed bawdy recitations are inordinately long. They often also use the lengthy come-all-ye double lines of seven stresses each; for example the sex-education classic and hands-down modern favorite in America, "The Diary of a Young (or French) Stenographer," given by Morse, pp. 67-71. This is also the rhythm of the Scottish contender, for both length & strength, "The Ball o' Kirriemuir," a song that I doubt even the most unrepentant tune-measurer, hunched over his computer printouts, would maintain owes its international preeminence to any intrinsic melodic appeal.

Most of the epics of sexual intercourse, considered as a sadistic struggle, seem to use this form; from "The Ballad of Gaffer Hepplethwaite" (in Immortalia and Morse) to the British favorite, "Eskimo Nell," and her homosexual counterparts, Eugene Field's

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"Socratic Love" and "The Grooving of Dan McGrew" (in Morse, p. 78: believed to be a self-parody by Robert W. Service, to whom "The Bastard King of England" is also seriously attributed); as also Field's "A French Crisis, or The Fair Limousin," and the female-dominant contrapositive of all these, "Samari Sal," the Australian contender, in which it is the Toothbreaker hero, Jock McPhail, who is killed by the vagina dentata heroine, and not the reverse. Also, most recently, "The Screwing of Suzie Stranahan," an anti-hippie epic in 34 stanzas, signed "Roger Herwell," and issued in hektograph by its author (Brooklyn, N.Y. 1968). Another great favorite, the "Ode to the Four-Letter Words," is a poor and lengthy imitation (in another meter) of Eugene Field's brilliant word-catalogues in rhyme, but is just as popular.

Almost all of these — as one perfect example, "The Lay of the Four Prominent Bastards" attributed to Ogden Nash — have, to any ear, a certain "educated" quality about them that one might expect would chill their folk-acceptance, but such is not the case. They are all great favorites. Both singers and audiences love long, bloody ballads and even longer and more aggressive recitations, with plenty of stanzas and gore; and have loved them since ancient times. The addition of sex to this formula is not calculated to reduce its popularity. Again, the current Negro "toasts" are very much to the point: some of them are nearly as long and violent as Child Ballads.

"The Ballad of Chambers Street." — If one were to lay out on a scale all the bawdy rhymed recitations in English, according to their aggressiveness against and offensiveness to women, there can be little doubt that, of recitations circulating in the white culture, the one lying squarely at the "most aggressive and offensive" end would be either "The Great Wheel" or "The Ballad of Chambers Street." I have discussed "The Great Wheel" in The Horn Book, pp. 327 and 422, and in greater detail in Rationale II. 473-4, and 655, also covering its psychological understructure. Full texts are given in Harry Morgan's More Rugby Songs (London, 1968) p. 136, as "The Blacksmith;" and in Edward B. Cray's The Erotic Muse (New York, 1969) also p. 136, as "The Fucking Machine," setting it to the hymn tune, "The Old Hundred." I have not heard it to this tune, but to two others, one being "Oh Master, Let

94 G. Legman

Me Walk With Thee," and also as a chant. It is essentially a recitation and not a song at all, and is usually delivered with a symbolically very heavy beat, coming down hammer-hard on each iambic accent, especially at the end, when the Great Wheel or mechanical dildo, which has been invented to satisfy the inventor's unsatisfiable wife, goes faster and faster and finally out of control, until at last the woman cries, "Enough, enough, I'm. satisfied!" (Always sung out in a mocking falsetto.)

But this was the case of the biter bit,
There wasn't no method of stopping it —
His wife was ripped from twat to tit,
The whole damn contraption went up in shit!

"The Ballad of Chambers Street" takes up where this leaves off. The woman, whose offense in this case is simply that she is having a baby, is filled with dynamite by two bumbling obstetricians, and is exploded. For further details, see the text. As I have observed in Rationale II. 400, in the section on "The Defiling of the Mother," only some thirty years later, during the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy in 1935, did the greatest of all modern ćsthetic critics — he only said one line, but it was enough — Vittorio Mussolini, son of the Italian dictator, make the deathless observation, similar to that concerning Mount Aetna in the fourth stanza from the end here, that when he dropped bombs from his airplane on the fleeing Ethiopians on the roads, their bodies and blood exploded into the air "like a beautiful rose unfolding."

Perfectly typical of medical sadistic humor, "The Ballad of Chambers Street" is only one of a number of such recitations in English, and even more in French. The latter are included in the French medical and art students' and soldiers' very large repertory of such "chansons de Salles de Garde," and are most completely published in the rare Anthologie Hospitaličre et Latinesque (Paris, 1911-13, 2 vols.) compiled under the pseudonym of "Courtepaille" by a pharmacist-bookseller, "Dr." Edmond D. Bernard. (Copy: Ohio State Univ.) Few of the English-language medical recitations of this kind have been published. They have remained the private delectation of physicians' yearly get-togethers, similar to the bawdy songs and recitations of less specialized type delivered at the annual entertainments of other professional groups, such as the Dutch Treat Club in New York, the Philadelphia Sketch Club, and

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many others. The most brilliantly humorous medical recitation, "Professor John Glaister," was first published in the rare mimeographed folio, Camp Fire Songs and Verse [Madras, India, ca. 1939] f. 42, noted as singable to the tune of "Dumpledown Daisy;" then in Snatches & Lays [Australia, 1962], and has now finally seen actual print, in the second edition of the latter collection, Melbourne: Sun Books / Macmillan, 1973. Here a longer and somewhat different version of "Professor John Glaister" is given as a recitation, pp. 84-5, noting that it stems from the Glasgow Medical School, which I see no reason to doubt.

"The Ballad of Chambers Street" is not a ballad at all, as it has no tune, but was doubtless expected to be supplied one eventually. It is very much in the style of Eugene Field's similar epics delivered before the Papyrus Club of Boston, in 1888, then only twenty years before, and is in the long, seven-stress couplets usual to this type of thing, as discussed above. It has, however, an unexpected fillip of high good humor in the inner rhyme and the extra "feminine" syllable at the end of every line until the catastrophe, to add a certain bounce. The author is invariably stated to have been Dr. Frederick ("Fritz") Irving, a luminary of the Harvard Medical School about 1910. This text was given me at Harvard in 1940 by the college poet, who also had several of T. S. Eliot's unpublished bawdy poems, in the series concerning "King Bungo and his Great Black Queen," possibly inspired by the "King of the Goddam Islands," above. (These are now all in the hands of Eliot's widow, and formerly of his executor, the late Conrad Aiken, of Savannah, Georgia.) A slightly different text of "The Ballad of Chambers Street" had been collected at Yale the year before, containing two less stanzas. These are present, however, in a further text, with many variants, especially in the names and places, supplied by a Boston physician in 1956, who stated that it had originally circulated among medical students of his class at Harvard about 1912. I do not believe this has been published before.

Now in the East the gleaming wheel of Phoebus' car is turning;
Up in a suite in Chambers Street, the gas is dimly burning;
And from the floor there comes a roar that wakes up every neighbor,
"Oy Oy!" it says; "Gewalt, gewalt!" — Big Rosie is in labor.

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For twenty years this flame of love had kept herself quite busy
Dispensing screws to lustful Jews — to Abie, Ike, and Izzie.
The male West End called her its friend; with scalped and eager penis
They got aboard, and oft explored this much-frequented Venus.
But as the pitcher at the well was fractured in the fable,
After the horse was pinched, of course, they then locked up the stable;
So tansy teas, and soft bougies, and local applications
Had ne'er returned what she most yearned: those absent menstruations.

For high above the pelvic brim, placed in a soft depression,
Beyond the wound of probe or sound, reposed her indiscretion.
The rascal grew, and wriggled too; and word was passed around:
Some sprightly wight had met by night Rose with her britches down.

Now bards may sing of Dido's plight, deserted on the shore-a,
Ćneas gay, off down the bay, annexing her angora;
Our heroine did not repine; although she often wondered,
She could not think whose festive dink had scored an even hundred.

Now full ten times the pallid moon had risen in the heavens,
And did disclose to pregnant Rose herself at six and sevens.
A vague unrest starts in her breast, and centers in her belly;
She sweats, she quakes, and water makes, and shakes like guava jelly.

To rescue damsels was the wont of valiant knights of old;
So Jo-Jo Pratt put on his hat, and came when he was told.
In nineteen-three, in O.P.D., with potions soporific,
He'd made her crap, and cured her clap, and treated her specific.

But ere he left his residence, he scanned the leaves of Cooper,
To make him sure naught but manure came down a lady's pooper.

Bawdy Monologues 97
For Hunter — John — had nothing on this suave, urbane physician,
The type and print of Austin Flint: a damned poor obstetrician.

"Great William Osier!" — through his brain there shot a beam of light;
"She must be seen by Charlie Green," he gurgled in delight.
"By Charlie Green she must be seen, to banish black despair —
With his little prick, and his walking-stick, and his beard of pubic hair."

High in that suite in Chambers Street, before the waters broke,
From pregnant Rose they took the clothes, and never a word they spoke.
They laid her head across the bed; her knees they had to bend 'em;
With sterile hands they made demands, distending her pudendum.

"Introitus admits my fist without the slightest urgin';
Therefore I ween," said Charlie Green, "that she is not a virgin.
And I would dare almost declare that she has had coition,
Which in the main would best explain her present sad condition."

So all throughout that summer's day they grappled for the foetus
With hooks and hands, with tongs and bands; says Jo, "It sure does beat us.
Now would the Gods with traction rods, though risking many stitches,
Pull into view that God-damned Jew, the prince of sons of bitches."

Then as the shades of evening fell, and night crept on at last,
They did conspire to prime and fire; to countermine and blast.
High in the sluice they laid the fuse, with no one to detect 'em;
They bought a pound of dynamite, and shoved it up her rectum.

Proud Aetna in her salad days, on that Sicilian shore,
Did not erupt much more abrupt than did that Hebrew whore.

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With mangled child she much defiled the waters of the bay;
His balls fell short of Cambridge port; his cod struck there to stay.

His limbs and lights flew high aloft, and slowly fell to earth;
At Boston Light, all through the night, they got the afterbirth.
The state-house dome a sickly chrome was stained with fetal feces;
They said "God damn!" in Framingham as they swept up the pieces.

From many a little village spire, as fades the passing day,
The curfew tolls the parting knell remarked upon by Gray.
The lowing kine in tardy line are wand'ring o'er the lea;
The pensive horse is cropping gorse — whatever that may be.

'Tis quiet now in Chambers Street; the crowds have homeward turned;
With reverent tread they bear the dead out of the house that burned.
And Charlie Green has not been seen; and as for Jo-Jo Pratt —
I do not know, nor give a damn, where he is really at.

"Our Lil," "Lady Lil," "Our Nell," "Pisspot Pete," and other titles. — Somewhat more of a fair contest between the male and female protagonists than the preceding poem, but the woman is eventually destroyed here too, also through her vagina, in the typical "sadistic concept of coitus." And the Western miner telling the tale ends with the grudging little philosophic epitaph over her death, that she "had her boots on when she fell, So what the hell, boys, what the hell." Like the cowboy's simple headstone, after he was killed in a stampede, of a mite of board over his rock cairn, with the scrawled words: "he done his damdest." Which of us wants more? This recitation is always presented in highly dramatic fashion, with arm- and body-motions, extreme vocal range, etc., but with the words kept rolling out in an insistent rhythm. Some reciters inject various bits of local business, such as pausing to spit imaginary tobacco juice at a spittoon, and in this text even an explanatory aside ("But want fer long"). When the "lean galoot," who is usually referred to as a "half-breed" or "greaser" (Mexican), takes out his penis before the saloon idlers in some texts, and "the damn

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thing stretched from ihar — to thar," the teller's hands always measure off a wondering two-foot gauge or more.

The first printing of "Our Lil" was in T. R. Smith's anonymously edited Immortalia (1927, and reprints), where it is called "Lady Lil" and opens a group of recitations all of which are attributed to the American poet, Eugene Field. As all the others given are known to be authentically by Field, who died in 1895, and were printed first in The Stag Party in 1888, with the sole exception of "Lady Lil" (it should be noted that The Stag Party also contains certain other bawdy poems evidently by Field which have never been reprinted anywhere), it seems probable that the ascription of this piece to Field is also authentic. Two lines are missing from the text below, just after the famous measuring gesture, owing to laughter by the audience; these have been supplied from the Immortalia printing, in brackets.

The psychological substructure of this important American recitation, which is one of the most popular, and some of its proto-history, are studied in my The Horn Book, pp. 418-20. Compare also pp. 442-3, for the Danish and Scottish ballads (particularly "Kempy Kay," Child No. 33b-f ) as to repulsively ugly female anti-heroines of domineering sexual nature, referred to as loathsome hags or the "Fu'some Fug;" sometimes even more plainly as ensorcelled snakes or toads whom the hero must "kiss," or more anciently a Dragon to be slain: the vagina dentata critter of antiquity. Of one of these hags, the usually highly expurgatory Francis J. Child does not hesitate to begin the description of her female-dominance sexual encounter with the hero (where "The slaver that hang atween their twa gabs [mouths], Wad hae tether'd a ten year auld bill [bull]"), as follows:

Ilka pap into her breasts
Was like a saffron bag,
And aye his hand at her a[rs]e
Was tearing up the scabs.

This is precisely the tradition of sex-hatred in "Our Lil" too, where: "Her tits hung loose like the balls on a goose, And her ass was niggershit brown. . . . They fucked and fucked for hours and hours, Uprooted trees and shrubs and flowers" while Lil deals out her famous "rectum-riffs and corkscrew biffs, And stunts unknown to

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common quiffs." Some of the lines of even the milder form of the Child Ballad, as "Kemp Owyne" (Child No. 34; v. 214), could be inserted into the rhythmically similar "Eskimo Nell" for example, in Harry Morgan's enlarged version, without anyone knowing the difference:

Her breath was strong, and her hair was long,
And twisted was around the tree;
And with a swing she cried aloud,
Come to craig of sea and kiss with me.

"Our Lil" entered folk circulation in America at least by the 1910's, and an elegant woodcut "of the old school," by John Held Jr. is printed in Frank Shay's More Pious Friends and Drunken Companions (1928) p. 141, showing wasp-waisted Lil or Nell displaying her striped stockings to four white-bearded but appreciative miners, against a backdrop of timberlined mountaintops, but no text is ventured. A frighteningly expurgated version is given in George Milburn's Hobo's Hornbook (1930) p. 140, a real fantasy in asterisks, the first publicly-published approximation. Vance Randolph's Ozark manuscript collection, Vulgar Rhymes ( ms. 1954) gives several good texts, one heard by the reciter in Kirksville, Missouri, in 1918. Another adds a further funerary envoi, after the usual "had her boots on when she fell:"

So we cut off Lil's drawers all full of gore,
And nailed 'em on the shit-house door.

Several British imitations exist, in particular the one called "Eskimo Nell," which is very long and considerably heightens all the unpleasant aspects of the original, the woman being finally simply killed with a gun, replacing the impotent penis: an even clearer example of the "sadistic concept." Texts are given in Harry Morgan's Why Was He Born So Beautiful, and Other Rugby Songs (London: Sphere Books, 1967) pp. 57-66; and in Snatches & Lays (Melbourne, 1973) pp. 77-80. Both begin and end with versions of the old rhyming stanza, "When a man grows old and his balls grow cold," which will be discussed under "Drinking-Toasts" below. The present text of "Our Lil" is highly unusual in having been recovered from the recitation of a woman, in New York, 1943, who stated that she first heard it in 1925 in Idaho, when a very young

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girl. An amateur folksinger since long before the "Revival," I have known her over many years: she is not a lesbian, but is massively affected by the standard male-protest and jealousy of men's prerogatives, of which her giving this recitation (with gestures) is only one example, even in her style of delivery, with the tobacco-spitting and penis-measuring, and a violent hip bump at the climactic death-stroke, when "the half-breed nailed her through the cunt."

Nell was the best our camp produced,
And them as ain't never goosed Nell
Ain't had no goosin' and never will.

Nell taught school when she first come West,
But t'wan't fer long, for she liked fucking best.
There was a standin' bet around our town
That Nell could frig any man down.

At last there came a lean galoot
Called Scraggy Pete from Scroggin Chute,
And he 'lowed he could fuck our Nell.
We 'lowed so too—well [spits tobacco juice]

When he laid his tool across that bar,
The damn thing reached from here — to thar!
[We 'lowed our Lil had met her fate,
But thar warn't no backin' out that late.]

The elders decided to hold the mill
In the old brick shithouse on the hill,
Where all the boys could get a seat
And watch that half-breed hide his meat.

They started slow, like a summer breeze,
Blowin' gently through the trees. — But wan't fer long,
Fer when Nell fucks, she fucks for keeps,
And piles her victims up in heaps.

Nell tried shunts and double-bunts,
And tricks unknown to common cunts,
But the half-breed met her, trick for trick,
And just kept yardin' off more prick.

102                                                                         G. Legman

At last Nell slipped and missed a shunt,
And the half-breed nailed her through the cunt;
The ground was ploughed fer miles around
Where poor old Nell's ass hit the ground.

But stranger, I am here to tell — [spits]
Nell had her boots on when she fell,
So what the hell, boys, what the hell.

"The Guardsman." — Dripping with authenticity, this British patter-song or recitation of the music-hall type unfortunately lacks the 4th line, rhyming with paint, but I am glad to have it at all, having searched fruitlessly for it for over twenty years. I received the present text in 1975, from a book-editor in London to whom I had sent the page-proofs of Rationale II, in which, in the section on "Male Prostitution," pp. 252-3, the plot of this female-dominant piece is given, as it had been described to me by an informant at Chelmsford Prison, Essex, in 1954, who unfortunately could not remember the words exactly. My new informant stated that it is not a song but a recitation, and that he had written it down on hearing it delivered in Catford, London, in 1957, with the intention of using it for recitation himself.

Aside from the perfectly achieved "art of sinking" (described by Alexander Pope in Peri Bathos, in 1727, as the essence of bathos) in the increasingly clear propositions made by the Dowager Duchess, the main humor for the audience clearly resides in the identification with the "lower class" or "non-U" language of the Guardsman, from the "guy" in his second line, to the illiterate "been-and" construction with which he ends. All this in contrast to his brag of being a millionaire himself, to be sure, and unavailable sexually to the hated aristocracy for a mere Ł.100. My original informant had given much more detail here. The Guardsman replies, marking Time: "Madam! I'd have you know that I am a Viscount, of noble lineage of the greatest antiquity. I've money, castle, three country estates, two town houses, and properties in Portugal and Brazil. I've 2 Rolls Royces, a sports car, a hunter, and a yacht. . ." Symbolically, the man's pantomimed marking time up & down represents the intercourse that does not take place.

The Dowager Duchess was driving one day,

Bawdy Monologues 103

Past Buckingham Palace her chauffeur did stray.
The Rolls was a-gleaming with polish and paint
[But the dear old Duchess was feeling quite faint]

The reason for this I will make quite clear
To you drunken buggers, all filled up with beer.
She spotted a guardsman of stature so grand,
And signalled the chauffeur to stop with her hand.

Oh guardsman, dear guardsman, please come home with me,
Well sit by the fire and have crumpet for tea.
I'll show you my stables and gardens so fine,
And when you are ready we'll go in to dine.

My husband, the Duke, has been dead for a year,
And I'd very much like you to sleep with me, dear.
I'm willing to give you a full hundred pounds
If you will undress me and ride me to hounds.

The guardsman he moved not a muscle, but said,
Dear lady, I've no wish to take you to bed.
You've pinched the wrong guy; I've got mansions galore,
I've millions of pounds, and I've girls by the score.

One night at the Grosvenor, I got pissed as a fart;
When I woke up next morning, it near broke my heart
— I'd been and enlisted a guardsman to be,
And if anyone wants fucking, I reckon it's me.

Complaints. — Prose complaints have been sampled above. Quite a number also exist in verse. These are usually set to music, comparable to the older complainte de la mal-mariée in French and Scottish folksong, which is most often sung in the character of the young mal-mariée herself, warning other girls against marrying impotent old men. The best-known American song-example is "No Balls At All," a parody, still current, of the Civil War anti-woman poem, "Nothing To Wear," by William Allen Butler (1857). An excellent comedy recitation of complaint in comedy-Irish dialect, "The Street Cleaner's Dream," is given in Morse's Folk Poems and Ballads [1948] pp. 72-3; this is clearly inspired by Eugene Field's child-poem, "Seein' Things At Night," and manages to get the crucial word "harse-shit" into almost every line. A music-hall song, rather similar but even funnier, complains of the fate of a fine young Irish policeman who has been "Blinded With Shit." Texts in:

104 G. Legman

Camp Fire Songs and Verse [Madras, ca. 1939] f. 26, as "The Auld Woman of Dublin;" also in Edward B. Cray's The Erotic Muse (New York, 1969), pp. 47, and 163-4, as "Blinded With Turds" and "Dirty Old Brown." These are more scatological but less amusing than the British version. A large number of anti-family poems also exist.

The following three items are all given in the British army mimeographed collection, Camp Fire Songs and Verse [ca. 1939] ff. 8, 51, and 73, as "About a Buggy," "Look at the Flahwers" (apparently to be recited in the character of a Cockney child), and "Slip It to Me," which speaks for itself. Only the first of these has been printed elsewhere, in an inferior version entitled "A Letter from the Postmaster," in Immortalia, etc. An imitation of this is also current in America, in parodic song form, in which the first letter of each line acrostically spells out the real message: that the girl is about to become a "m-o-t-h-e-r" (followed by the man's reply, on the word "f-a-t-h-e-k," rejecting her).

[Letter from a Farmer to a Young Man:]

I've a buggy old and broken
Which I'm keeping as a token,
There are footprints on the dashboard upside down;
And there's stains upon the cushion
Which show there's been some pushin',
And my daughter dare not show her face in town.

[The Young Man's Reply:]

Yes, 'twas I that upped your daughter,
Pulled her tits and stopped her water,
And made footprints on the dashboard upside down.
But the damage to my penis
Since I met your daughter, Venus,
Makes me wish I'd never seen your goddam town.

Look at the flahwers, furkin' great orchids.
Look at the corfin, lined with lead.
Look at the people, furkin' well cryin';
Isn't it nice to be furkin' well dead.

Bawdy Monologues                                                   105

Slip it to me easy, for it hurts most delicious,
Honey, for you I pine.
When the moon is shining on the old persimmon tree,
Slip it to me easy, honey, slip it to me.

Say, Nigger, you ain't got no kind of disease?
No, suh, upon my soul.
Then kiss me, kid, for I'm about to cream —
Lord, I'm out of control.

Considered by many the best modern bawdy recitation — and one of the few that women enjoy — "The Portion of a Woman" and its reply are both first given on f. 61 of Camp Fire Songs and Verse, issued in mimeograph form by a British cavalry regiment stationed in Madras, India, during the "Phoney War" period of late 1939 or early 1940, as several included items demonstrate. The poem is here signed "A.P.H.," which refers it to the British wit and Member of Parliament, Alan Patrick Herbert, whose authentic composition it is believed to be. I have heard this piece delivered with splendid brio (with the ascription to A. P. Herbert, and with the superior opening: "That portion of a woman that appeals to man's depravity") in La Jolla, Calif. 1965, by the Blake expert, the late Dr. Jacob Bronowski, who learned it in England. I heard it ten years earlier, in a private men's club in London. (It is also well known in the United States, at least the first four stanzas; being printed in Folk Poems and Ballads [1948] p. 64.) Here all the sporty old gentlemen, such as the one whose guest I was, enjoyed the piece visibly; while the younger businessmen-type members were cold and rather disapproving. Altogether, it was a far cry from the riotous scene in just such an English club, "The Scufflers," unforgettably described in Julian Sharman's A Cursory History of Swearing (1884, pp. 9-10; reprinted in full in The Horn Book, p. 383), where matters approach a pandemonium of appreciation for the singing of the famously aggressive hanging-song, "Samuel Hall," with all the members joining frenetically in the chorus of "Damn your eyes!"

The poem below should be compared, in its urbane normality, with the famously sick estimation of the female genitals by St. Odon of Cluny, a medieval church-father famous principally for

106 G. Legman

this one line: "Inter fasces et urinam nascimur" (We are born between shit and piss), which suggests almost as close an optical assessment as that of A. P. Herbert. Compare also the equally sick estimation in "Crazy Jane and the Bishop," by the Irish poet and occultist, W. B. Yeats: "hove has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement," an insulting and strabismic revamp of Odon's remark which hundreds of thousands of American college-girls are for some reason required to study and admire.

Those portions of a woman which appeal to man's depravity
Are constructed with considerable care,
And what appears to you to be a simple little cavity
Is really an elaborate affair.

And doctors of distinction who've examined these phenomena
In numbers of experimental dames,
Have made a list of all the things in feminine abdomena,
And given them delightful Latin names.

There's the vulva, the vagina, and the jolly perinćum;
The hymen (which is found in many brides),
And lots of little gadgets you would love if you could see 'em:
The clitoris and lord knows what besides.

What a pity then it is, that when we common people chatter
Of the mysteries to which I have referred,
We should use for such a delicate and complicated matter
Such a very short and unattractive word.

[The Layman's reply to A.P.H.]

The erudite authorities who study the geography
Of that obscure but interesting land,
Are able to indulge a taste for intimate topography,
And view the scenic details close at hand.

But ordinary people, though aware of the existence
Of complexities beneath the public knoll,
Are normally content to survey them at a distance,
And treat them, roughly speaking, as a whole.

And therefore, when we laymen probe the secrets of virginity
We exercise a simple sense of touch,

Bawdy Monologues 107

And do not cloud the issue with meticulous Latinity,
And simply call the whole a such and such.

For men have made this useful, but inelegant commodity
The topic of innumerable jibes,
And though the name they use for it is not without its oddity
It somehow suits the object it describes.

A final type of complaint is set up in the classical "ministrel-show" patter style, between interlocutor and straight- or end-man, here in their last 1920's avatar as "Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean." One bawdy form of this is given in Anecdota Americana: First Series [edited by Joseph Fliesler; New York, 1927] No. 162; reprinted in The Book of a Thousand Laughs, by "O. U. Schweinickle" [Wheeling, W.Va. 1928] p. 73. (Copies of both these works, Kinsey Library.) Another "Gallagher & Shean" parody, more interesting in some ways, is printed in Samuel Roth's magazine, Two Worlds (New York, June 1927) p. 312, as between the sexologist Havelock Ellis, and Dr. Sigmund Freud:

O Mr. Ellis, O Mr. Ellis!
Sex has peculiar angles, as you say;
But I don't see the idear of coitus from the rear,
Though it seems to be the fashion of the day.

O Dr. Freud, O Dr. Freud!

Do you mean to say that you have never hoid?
The position you suggest, is in fact the very best —

I deny it, Mr. Ellis —

You should try it, Dr. Freud!

Twenty years later, Mr. Richard Roth, the son of the editor of the preceding parody, gave me a further, unpublished stanza in New York, 1947:

O Mr. Ellis, O Mr. Ellis!

Does a naked woman make you stand erect?
When you're reading Pushkin's verse
And she diddles you or worse,
Does it bother or disturb your intellect?

108 G. Legman

O Dr. Freud, O Dr. Freud!
My reactions are extremely anthropoid;
And the sight of her behind
Forces Pushkin from my mind —

Forces Pushkin, Mr. Ellis? —

Pushes foreskin, Dr. Freud!

First-Person Feminine. — Long screeds of erotic fantasy, obviously written by men yet put into the mouths of young women, are in all ways except poetically the most interesting of the bawdy recitations in verse. Erotic fantasies or avowals in the character of women, whether in verse or prose, are apparently highly intriguing and sexually encouraging to many men. Witness: Linda Lovelace and Xaviera Hollander. However, most of these have in the past been forged by the men themselves, thus representing not the real erotic fantasies of girls or women but those that men wish or assume they have. The earliest and one of the most striking examples is "The Letter Paraphras'd" by the boy-poet Thomas Chatterton, who died in 1770 at the age of seventeen. This is preserved in British Museum MS, 5766b, fol. 92, and was privately issued by "M. O. Hunter" [Thomas O. Mabbott of Hunter College; Metuchen, N.J.: Charles F. Heartman, 1933]: copies, Yale and British Museum, Private Case. It begins mildly enough: "My loving Dear, I send thee this, To tell thee that I want to piss," but ends with unexpected virulence — the girl had rejected Chatterton because of his youth — with her presumably saying that she will never have him "Unless I dangle with thy prick, Piss in thy face and let thee lick." This matter of cunnilinctus as a submissive act is also taken very seriously in current Negro "toasts."

In its simplest form, the "first-person feminine" fantasy is presented as a recitation in which the girl begins by repelling the man's advances, only to end by accepting everything, with various verbal ejaculations representing her orgasm. A 17th-century item like this is printed in John Wardroper's Love & Drollery (London,

1969) No. 318, and a modern example in rhyme entitled "A Parlor Scene — Time, 11 p.m." in the erotic magazine, The Boudoir, No. 4 ('1860' [London: Lazenby, 1883]): copy, Kinsey Library; reprinted in The Stag Party [Boston? 1888]. The latest form is in prose: a folded carbon-copy of a typewritten sheet, touchingly patched

Bawdy Monologues 109

with transparent tape, which was slipped into my hand as a prostitutory invitation, in New York City, West Side, 1952, by a Puerto Rican schoolgirl well below the legal age of consent. It is entitled "Echoes in the Parlor" and begins: "What do you mean George? Stop this very minute!" It then ends, twenty lines later: "Ah-h-h, How good that feels, m-m-m, Oh-h. — oh you nasty thing." The briefest version circulates as a typewritten single-sheet, and I have also seen it printed on a woman's gossamer scarf (1948):

Oh, please do not touch or kiss me!
Oh, please do not touch me!
Oh, please do not!
Oh, please do!
Oh, please!
Oh!!
!!!

This is unusual in its brevity. The case is usually the opposite. For sheer length, nothing in the erotic line can compare with the hopeless callithumpian doggerel of "The Bride's Confession" (inevitably "by Lord Byron"), extending to no less than seventy-two highly informative stanzas: twice the length of the similar but much cruder "Diary of a Young Stenographer," in rhyme, which has been printed separately but now usually circulates in typescript form, and was probably inspired by the older piece. "The Bride's Confession" was the first erotic poem I believe I ever saw (or was it the less graphic but more passionate "To Rosalie" — also "by Lord Byron" — given in Morse's Folk Poems and Ballads, 1948, pp. 23-4), having been shown a laboriously handwritten copy of it by an older girl when I was twelve years old, a fact which led me to believe for years that girls or women are really the authors of these productions. "The Bride's Confession" has now reached Australia, half a century later, and the full text is printed in Snatches & Lays (Melbourne, 1973) pp. 88-96: all seventy-two stanzas. Read 'em and weep! For folklorists who have spent too much time pressing the buttons on their tape-recorders and can no longer read (with pleasure, that is), "The Diary of a Young Stenographer" can now be procured on a long-playing phonograph record, I am told, spoken by a young woman in a deep, throaty voice.

The real question about these subliterary forms of sex-education

110 G. Legman

is, who writes them? The classics of erotic literature in the character of a woman are almost all by men: for example, Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 1749) by John Cleland; and the German Memoirs of Josefine Mutzenbacher (about 1905) by Felix Salten, author also of Bambi. At the level of erotic recitations or songs, all such poems have in the past been the creations of men, or so it would appear, beginning with Chatterton's "Letter Paraphas'd" and "A Masonic Song" by Robert Burns, also the similar and even more graphic "The Meikle Devil Damn This Cunt o' Mine," published in my type-facsimile of Burns' Merry Muses of Caledonia (New Hyde Park, N.Y., 1965) pp. 127-30. An interesting item of this kind, "Violate Me In Violet Time, In the Vi-olest Way You Know," was published under the name of its author. William Soskin, in The Bedroom Companion (ed. Philip Wylie, New York, 1934), as a mock or travesty of current "popular" and musical-comedy lyrics, but entered almost immediately into authentic oral transmission in America during World War II. This now appears anonymously in several of the private airforce mimeographica, as well as in J. Barre Toelken's delightful "The Folklore of Academe," in Jan Harold Brunvand's The Study of American Folklore (1968) pp. 317-37 at p. 324, as having been collected in a college sorority. It now displays all the well-garbled marks of oral transmission, e.g. Mr. Soskin's original sex-masochistic line, "Ruin me, ravage me, brutally, savagely," which is now sung as "Ravish me savagely, simply lavish me," in the text given by Dr. Toelken; along with
another female-protagonist item similar, p. 325, "I Wish I Were a Fascinating Bitch," which may actually have been written by a woman.

The latest such male fantasy in verse is that of Terry Southern (co-author of Candy, a "black-humor" pornographic novel of the 1950's also presumably in the character of its girl-heroine), who published in Oui magazine (Chicago, March 1975) Vol. IV, No. 3: p. 25, headed "Belly Lettres," a song purportedly sung by the staff-members of the Women's Liberation magazine, Ms., behind the editrix's back, beginning and ending: "Oh, puh-leeze put your R between my M and my S! Though I know it's gonna hurt and be a darn icky mess! . . . And you can F my brains out just as hard as you please! I promise to stay wet down to the back of my knees!" (I won't even believe that one when I hear the tape-recording.)

Bawdy Monologues 111

The most extreme statement of this kind is a recitation called variously "A Girl's Prayer," "The Yeomanette," and other titles, first recorded in the scarce erotic miscellany, Cleopatra's Scrapbook ('Blue Grass, Kentucky' [Wheeling, W.Va.?] 1928: copy, Kinsey Library) p. 53. This begins romantically, "Put your arms around me, darling," and so forth, each stanza becoming more and more passionate, though never omitting the "darling" — in deference to the presumed female character of the speaker — until it ends in a blaze of castratory (vagina dentata) passion, after the orgasm: "Break it off and let it stay!" Other texts of this recitation are longer and much heightened in their eroticism, in one case by a man known to me. The pornography and "fantasy"-fiction writer, N. R. de Mexico (Robert Bragg, who is not the man just referred to, and who was born in New Jersey), was accustomed to deliver this piece at mixed parties. Although he did not change the already-supercharged text, he would attempt to heighten still further its tone of female erotic acceptance and passion by reciting, or rather crooning it, in a special dialect accent. He assured me that it was "much more exciting when you say it like a red-hot nigger wench," meaning that he would recite the girl's presumed lines in a sultry, comedy-Negro falsetto.

"Horseman's Word Toasts." — There is some mystery to modern reciters about the word "toasts," as applied by themselves to long and generally obscene narrative recitations in loose couplet rhyme, rather than to the short "drinking-toasts" centuries old. Bruce Jackson, one of the most successful collectors of recent black-culture toasts, opens his Preface by saying frankly: "I've never met anyone who knows why these poems are called toasts." Actually, there is no great difference between the older drinking-toasts and those not drunk to nowadays, except that of length. During the 1940's I heard a white Virginian (an "officer and gentleman") give the following drinking-toast: "High-riding horses, gentlemen, and porcupine saddles to our enemies!" An erotic British version of this, at least a century older, also exists. I am only sorry now I was not able to ask him where in Britain his family originated, for it is only a step from those "porcupine saddles" to the modern dysphemistic and bragging narrative toasts.

The men's club bawdy magazines and song-books of the 1780's,

112 G. Legman

and for a century following (see the lists in my The Horn Book, pp. 186-7, and 375; and in Hoffmann's Analytical Survey, pp. 41, and 132-4), all featured columns of brief erotic and double-entendre toasts, evidently collected rather than written by the editors. There is a delightful anecdote in The Letters of John Keats (ed. Buxton Forman, 1931) in a letter dated January 5th, 1818, on a young man at a party, "after the Ladies had retired from the supper table," offering such a toast, of exceptional brevity: "Mater Omnium!" (The whole anecdote is reprinted in Capt. Francis Grose's invaluable folklore source, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785; ed. Partridge, 1931, p. 112, at cunt.) Though drinking-toasts of any kind are now quite moribund in white America, since Prohibition in the 1920's; also in England, where one seldom now hears more than a muttered "Cheers!" the bawdy toasts have kept their popularity in Scotland in an unbroken line since the 18th century, when it may be assumed that Scotch-Irish immigrants brought the custom to the American South, later to the Southwest. All editions of Burns' Merry Muses of Caledonia (except the first edition, 1800) include a group of such "Sportsmen's Toasts and Sentiments," through the 1870's and beyond. Most editions also include a tour-de-force recitation or poem in the from of a rhymed collection of these, thirteen stanzas long, entitled simply "The Toasts" (in later editions "A Sentimental Sprig"), in which, however, each separate toast takes up only one rhyming line. This had appeared first in the very rare The Giblet Pye ('Shamborough,' [1806]: copy, W. N. H. Harding Collection, Chicago.) A particularly ornate set, dating from 1732 to 1820, is printed in the transactions of the Scottish "Beggar's Benison and Merryland" society, issued on the disbanding of the society in the late-19th century as Supplement to the Records of the Beggar's Benison ('Anstruther' [Sheffield: Leonard Smithers, Erotika Biblion Society], 1892) pp. 17-23: copies, British Museum, Private Case; and National Library of Scotland. These are all of the punning or double-entendre type. The modern rhyming quatrain toasts of erotic nature are first and very fully recorded in Forbidden Fruit: A Collection of Popular Tales [Scotland, ca, 1890] pp. 39-43, an erotic miscellany of which only one copy is known to have survived. (See my edition of Bums' Merry Muses of Caledonia, New Hyde Park, N.Y., 1965, p. 288. There is a microfilm of this unique copy of Forbidden Fruit in the School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh.)

Bawdy Monologues 113

Anyone who cares to search out the history of modern narrative toasts should certainly begin with the "ordeal" aspect in the drinking of toasts in Elizabethan times and since, as discussed at some length in The Horn Book, pp. 187, and 441-5. These toasts in ordeal-form sometimes involved drinking down a burning candle-end, called a Flapdragon or Snapdragon — the modern "bobbing for apples" at Hallowe'en — and sometimes even the drinking of the contents of the beloved or "toasted" woman's chamberpot. This also survives, though in faked or modified form, as with chocolate-flavored champagne drunk out of a chamberpot at weddings, and in fraternity initiations. See further, Rationale II. 857, and especially 923-4. Shakespeare alludes to this politely in the line, "drinke up Esile [vinegar], eate a Crocodile," when Hamlet challenges Laertes at Ophelia's grave to compete with him in showing his grief.

This identical usage or ordeal survives, though now in verbal form only, in a modern Negro drinking-toast, as given in Bruce Jackson's Get Your Ass In the Water (Harvard University Press, 1974) Nos. 97a-b, and intruded into No. 30, pages 230 and 127. I have also collected forms of it from white informants since 1944, as "Here's to Mag." The intruded lines, in Jackson's No. 30, end:

before I scale your rusty thighs and suck your bloodshot tits.
I'll drink a gallon of rattlesnake blood and swim in a ocean of shit.

The format of these gruellingly obscene and aggressive rhymed toasts, which survive now mostly in Scotland and among American Negroes, was probably brought from Britain in pre-Revolutionary times, if not during the early 19th century. The same may well be true of the equally Scottish format taken in Negro "sounding" or "the Dozens," which are another type of verbal ordeal (though perhaps with formal origins in Africa, as in the Apo ceremony of insults among the Ashanti), as I have attempted to put into a somewhat new focus in Rationale II, pages 782-809.

Even more specifically Scottish in origin or genealogy is a formulaic Negro brag, of which Jackson, pp. 104-7, cites three dissimilar texts, one from H. Rap Brown's Die Nigger Die, another collected in Los Angeles by Anthony M. Reynolds, and a third from Jackson's own collecting, which was worked into his text 22a, "Pimping Sam," by the performer as follows:

114 G. Legman

Say, "Bitch, this is Pimping Sam, the world's wonder,
long-dick buck-bender, all-night grinder, womb-finder,
sheet-shaker, baby-maker, and money-taker."

Compare now with this the Scottish version of precisely the same sort of alliterative brag, or in this case insult, since the insult is merely the contrapositive of the brag. This forms part of the great "Flyting [contest-in-insults] Betwixt Polwart and Montgomery," which took place about the year 1580 in Scotland, and is thirty-two pages long, as cited in part in Rationale II. 786-8:

Fond Fliter, shit Shiter, Bacon Byter, all defil'd,
Blunt-bleitar, Paddock-pricker, Pudding-eater perverse . . .
Land-louper, light Skouper, ragged Rouper like a Raven,
Halland-shaker, Draught-raker, Bannock-baiker, all beshitten.

Alliterative and assonant brags like these became traditional on the American frontier until the mid-19th century, when one might hear: "I'm the widow-maker and an undertaker; stay away, boys, 'cause if I gits mad I'm a wave o' destruction! I eats pig-iron and spits nails, and I ride the cyclone! Let me breathe thunder! I wrassle grizzly b'ars and make 'em kiss — my — foot [sic]!" Mark Twain has a great passage of this sort of well-expurgated contest-in-brag just preceding the fight on the raft in Life on the Mississippi (1883). Though we will never know what Mark Twain said when he famously swore, at least the real Scottish originals of this sort of thing are on record, in Robert Burns' letter of phallic brag to Robert Ainslie, March 3rd, 1788 (printed in The Horn Book, pp. 148-9); and several centuries earlier in the "Flyting Betwixt Polwart and Montgomery," in James Watson's Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems (1711; private reprint, Glasgow, 1869) III. 1-32. Even further beyond lie the brags and "gabs" of the Scandinavian and Scottish warriors of the Middle Ages, intended to intimidate their foes in battle (See the headnote to Child Ballad No. 30, "King Arthur and King Cornwall," I. 277-8, which beats them all.) A type of thing still recollected in the "Rebel yell" of the Civil War, in the "camping" (from the French camper, to posture boldly) of ostentatious homosexuals, fabulously documented in Bruce Rodgers' "gay Lexicon," The Queens' Vernacular (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972), and in the intimi-

Bawdy Monologues 115

dating grunts and howls of Japanese "martial arts" for the recent export market.

The modern Scottish bard and folksong collector, Hamish Henderson, of the School of Scottish Studies, recorded in 1952 some of the erotic toasts given at the private meetings of a surviving secret society in Scotland, the "Horseman's Word." This is not similar to the "Beggar's Benison," but more like the "Padstow Horse" secret society in Cornwall, which also has a sexual initiation of young acolyte members the night before the public ritual running of the "horse." (Compare the legend of Lady Godiva at Coventry.) This is clearly indicated in the splendid documentary film, "Hoss, Hoss!" made by Peter Kennedy and Alan Lomax of the Padstow Horse celebration. Hamish Henderson's group of "Horseman's Word" toasts are all in rhyme, and he notes: "After the novices had been given the Word, the serious drinking began and they had to [n.b.] give a toast — the rougher the better . . . They were a rich store of Rabelaisian verse."

Printed below are some of these rhymed toasts of the "Horseman's Word," as collected by Hamish Henderson in Turriff, Aberdeenshire, in 1952. [Nos. 1 and 2 are followed in brackets by their American Negro counterparts, as collected by Bruce Jackson, with his serial numbers.] Following the rhymed recitations are two in prose, Nos. 6a and 6B,which are even more strikingly similar to the American Negro narrative-toast forms. These were collected by Henderson, No. 6a from a Paisley Scot soldier in Egypt, 1942; and No. 6b from a Glasgow reporter in Tobermory, Isle of Mull, 1959.

It is certain that the toasts have not remained really "secret," even in Scotland, and also that some of them have been transported long ago to the United States. Kenneth Goldstein gives a version of No. 2, collected in New Pitsligo, Aberdeenshire, 1960, from a man who learned it in the British army; and of a combination of Nos. 4 and 5, from a woman in Strichen, Aberdeenshire, in his manuscript collection, Buchan Bawdry. Furthermore, versions of all the Scottish toasts in rhyme given below have been collected by me in America, from white informants, between 1935 and 1953. No. 3 is sung in America as the ending of "The Wayward Boy" (see Edward B. Cray, The Erotic Muse, New York, 1969, pp. 36-7, a text not including this stanza), to the tune of "The Girl I Left Behind Me," as follows:

116 G. Legman

I fucked her once, I fucked her twice,
I fucked her once too often;
I broke the mainspring in her ass,
And left her in her coffin.

Of No. 4, a white American epitaph version is given in Morse's Folk Poems and Ballads [1948] p. 96, beginning: "Here lies the amorous Fanny Hicks, the scabbard of ten thousands pricks." The central lines of No. 5, about flying, are centuries old: they appear in the original graffiti collection, The Merry-Thought, or The Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany (London, 1731: copy, Oxford), and are paraphrased in the self-written epitaph of the English printer, John Baskerville, who died in 1775. The original of the epitaph form of No. 4 is quoted from two 17th-century English manuscripts in John Wardroper's Love & Drollery (1969) No. 298; both omit the Scottish lines on witchcraft and damnation.

1. Here's to oak, the best of wood,
The stiffest cock that ever stood,
The swiftest hare that ever run,
The hairiest fud [cunt] the better fun.

[100. Hickory wood is the best of wood,
crackin' does the women good,
make them open their eyes
and stretch their thighs,
give their ass exercise.]

2. Here's to the swan that swims in the dam
And dips her neb [beak] in adultery.
Here's to the bonny lass that lies on her back
And fucks for the good of her country.

[95. And here's to the duck that swim the pond
and never got a feather wet,
and here's to the lady who sells her ass
and ain't caught the syphilis yet.]

3. Here to the lass that I fucked last
I fucked her for a token.
I broke the main-spring o' her airse
An' left her cunt wide open.

Bawdy Monologues 117

4. Here's to aul' Belle Dick,
She's skinned mony a standin' prick.
She's lived a whure an' died a witch,
And intae hell she's hurled, a bitch.
And if ye want to do her honour,
Tak oot yir cock and pish upon 'er.

5. There wis a wifie ca'd Missis Skinner,
An' Murray B------he aye wis in 'er.
He fucked 'er stan'in', he fucked her lyin',
An' if she'd had wings,
he'd have fucked her flyin'.
An' now she's dead, an' long forgotten,
He'd dig 'er up an' fuck her rotten.

6a. Gie me a nice Presbyterian lass, wi' breists like
'neeps [turnips], an' her airse against a hay-rick —
then wi' the snell east wind soochin' through your
ba's, man, you's fuckin'!

6b. Gie me a reid-heided, sweattie-happit, ram-hippčd,
curly-cunted contra quine [country girl] ahint a
hay-rick, wi' the cauld north win' soochin' through
ma ba's, an' the spunk jerkin' oot ma cock like shite
from a sea-gull's airse — an' boy, Ah'm happy.

Drinking-Toasts and Hate-Toasts. — Although the largest development of the narrative toasts has been in the Negro culture in America, it would be an error to imagine that the shorter rhymed drinking-toasts of bawdy or offcolor contents are unknown in the white culture. To the contrary, they are equally common among both, and are delivered as brief recitations, though not necessarily with alcoholic drink in hand nowadays. (One does not toast in Pepsi-Cola.) It might be mentioned in passing that the plural of "toast" was colloquially pronounced "toastisses" in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, and apparently also in America; as recorded by Capt. Francis Grose in his posthumous The Olio (1792) in an anecdote on a city-dweller at breakfast at a country inn. (The Olio is an excellent but little-mined folklore source, and Grose's satirical collection of quacks' advertisements, A Guide to Health, Beauty, Riches, and Honour, 1785, is even better; plus of

118 G. Legman

course his superb Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.) Another such reduplicative or interruptive syllable still in use among American Negro reciters today — who do not say "toastisses," so far as I know — is "two-faceted," meaning having two faces, not two facets; as quoted in Bruce Jackson's Get Your Ass In the Water (1974) p. 101: "But it's hell to learn when you have to burn for some two-faceted cocaine broad."

Drinking-toasts are generally rhymed quatrains, and most but not all begin with the classic "Here's to . . ." The principal modern bawdy forms still surviving are first recorded in the rare erotic miscellanies, Forbidden Fruit: A Collection of Popular Tales [Scotland, ca. 1890] pp. 39-43; and in The Stag Party [Boston? 1888] passim, as described above. A number of drinking-toasts and associated quatrains are given in most of the more recent American erotic sources, in particular in Morse's Folk Poems and Ballads [Cleveland, 1948] pp. 93-100. In America at present, at educational levels "below" that of college (where bawdy limericks are principally appreciated, and often sung), a small repertory of limericks has been refashioned into toasts by changing the standard opening, "There was a young man of . . ." into "Here's to the man from . . ." and continuing identically. Other than the limerick-toasts, which are the least common, some of the drinking-toasts are presented as epitaphs (ritual obscenity connected with death and burial: see Rationale II. 741-3), or simply as amusing or wise old saws. This is an ancient type, of which here is the most frequently collected modern example, from a white informant, New York, 1950. It is also sometimes seen as a wall graffito, as are other such floating stanzas.

When a man grows old
And his balls grow cold,
And the head of his pecker turns blue,
And he goes to diddle
And it bends in the middle —
Did that ever happen to you?

This bawdy form is first found in The Stag Party (1888) unnumb. p. 256, but the wise-saw original is hundreds of years old, appearing in Cobbes Prophecies, his Signes and Tokens, his Madrigalls, Questions, and Answers (London, 1614; repr. 1890), by "Richard Rab-

Bawdy Monologues 119

let," f. C3v, in a group of similar "Madrigalls," all beginning with the word "when." As usual, it is the rhymes and rhythm that have survived, in parodied form.

When a man is old
And the wether blowes cold,
Well fare a fire and a fur'd Gowne:
But when he is young
And his blood new sprung,
His sweete hart is worth halfe the Towne.

Hate-toasts are prominent in the Scottish "Horseman's Word" toasts quoted above, and were common in Britain at least since the time of the Napoleonic wars, sometimes in the form of "crossed" toasts, in which one aggressive rhymed drinking-toast or curse is answered or countered by another, charm-fashion, to "unhex" it. A well-known crossed toast of this kind, as between the Congressmen from Maine and Iowa, is given in Rationale II. 795-6, followed by an even more florid anti-American hate-toast, first published in the pornographic magazine, The Pearl (London, July 1879) No. 1. One hate-toast is in the unusual form of an apostrophe to the female genitals, ambivalently loving and resenting the woman and her body, as will be seen. This is the identical tone struck in the superb erotic sonnet-sequence, "Romeo and Juliet" (imitated from Ronsard's "Lance au bout" and "O vermeillette fente"), by the American poet, H. Phelps Putnam, who died in 1948, as printed in Neurotica (1949) No. 5: p. 22, and in other sources. The present toast was recited by a young white ex-Marine from Redlands, California, in Paris, 1955. It was received with great applause by the group of young Americans present, including several girls.

Cunt, oh cunt, thou dirty slit,
Besmithered with hair, beslabbered with shit,
Like a polecat's ass, thou smellest bad,
But oh thou cunt! thou must — be — had.

The most frequently collected hate-toast is the "itching (or bleeding) piles" curse, a great favorite among both whites and blacks. It is also given as the final stanza, or envoi, in the main Australian cursing and anti-gallant recitation, "The Bastard from the Bush," in Snatches & Lays (ed. Ian Turner, 1962; repr. 1973)

120 G. Legman

pp. 82-3, with an improbable attribution to the poet, Henry Lawson. The following text was recited to a group of students playing chess in the Student Union, under the announced toast-title, "Here's to You, Pal," by a white Southern male student, at Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the autumn of 1935, who then immediately swung into "The Wayward Boy," as quoted above. Note the use of "goddam" in the last line. Most texts dating since World War II replace this with "fuckin'." Bruce Jackson gives three forms of this curse, all with "motherfucken" in the last line, at his Nos. 22a, 28, and 98 (pp. 107-8, 124, and 231), the first two in narrative toasts explaining the reason for the curse.

May itching piles molest you
And scumbags grow on your screw,
May crabs as big as buzzards
Light on your balls — and chew!

And when you're old and all clapped-up
And a syphilitic wreck,
May you fall down through your asshole,
And break your goddam neck!

Often combined with the "itching piles" curse is one of the most dysphemistic of the hate-toasts, "Here's to Mag." The closing lines of a Negro version of this are quoted above, comparing them to Hamlet's offer in his "crossing" of ordeal-toasts with Laertes, to "Drinke up Esile [vinegar], eate a Crocodile." These are from Jackson's No. 30, "L.A. Street," and he gives other forms of this at Nos. 28 and 97a-b (pages 124, 127, and 230). His No. 28 combines "Here's to Mag" with the "itching piles" curse, and this was also the case in a toast I collected from a Negro shoeshine boy in New York, in 1943 (during a lull in World War II), who stated that he came from Denver. When one of the other shoeshine boys saw me paying the first one for his toast, he told me that he knew one so much better, that the first one "wouldn't make a Sunday asshole for it." And he gave, as "Brother Joe Hardy," a version of "Casey Jones" in which the trip to Hell from Child Ballad No. 278 ends with the extraordinary lines (similar to those in Jackson's No. 44, "Cocaine Shorty," also a form of "Casey Jones"):

A little bit of pudding an' a little bit of rice
Made him crucify his prick like the Jews done Christ.

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I believe this was one of the first encounters by a white collector with Negro toasts, and over a decade before the first references to these in Richard Dorson's Negro Tales (1958) p. 87, and the texts presented by Langston Hughes & Arna Bontemps in The Book of Negro Folklore (1958).

The combination of "Here's to Mag" with the "itching piles" curse (but without any piles) also appears in a hate-toast given at a party of pimps and whores, as described in the frightening and authentic picture of black pimping and drug-addiction, Pimp: The Story of My Life, by "Iceberg Slim" (Robert Beck; Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1967) p. 165. Other than versions among whites, a complete text of "Here's to Mag," very similar to Jackson's No. 97a, was collected by Roger D. Abrahams in 1959, from an informant known as "Kid," for Abrahams' thesis, Negro Folklore from South Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania, 1962):

This is about a girl named Mag, the dirty bitch,
She's now suffering from the seven-year itch,
running from her nose.

Green flies eating up her motherfucking ass-hole.
Now before I die, between them dirty thighs,
And put my mouth on them dirty tits,
I'll drink two tons of bucket puke,
and eat a ton of nigger shit.

The reciter is alluding here to the tenet of faith among young American "black studs" and many white ones, that it is particularly unmanly to perform cunnilinctus on a woman, though he does not go any farther than to refer to her "dirty thighs" followed by refusing to put his mouth "on them dirty tits." This matter is discussed quite fully in Bruce Jackson's Get Your Ass In the Water (1974) pp. 19-20, and 44, pointing out that what is really involved is a fear of submitting to the woman's dominance. This is also probably the explanation of the horrible insults and cruelties against women in these toasts, especially those spoken in the character of a pimp, for example Jackson's No. 22d, "The Pimp," and even more especially No. 31, "The Lame and the Whore," which is much concerned with hellfire.

It should be observed that a rather different picture of Negro sexual latitudinarianism is shown, as to what a person can or can-

122 G. Legman

not do — or imagine — sexually, and still be considered "manly," or even human, in the series of texts given by Jackson, Nos. 40a-b and 41a-c, "The Freaks' Ball," and a brief similar group in Roger D. Abrahams' Deep Down in the Jungle (1964) pp. 168-70. There is also a similar but rarely encountered song "Shave 'em Dry," of which a private tape-recording exists, sung by a woman. Toasts of this type are often lumped under the title of "The Motherfuckers' Ball" or "The Bulldaggers' Ball" (on the analogy of "The Darktown Strutters' Ball," of course). Both titles are intended to imply that all the vile sexual imaginings being paraded, in excruciating detail, are really to be cast on the account of the unmanly homosexuals and overmanly lesbians, the "freaks" and "bulldaggers." These recitations, and possibly the orgiastic "balls" themselves (also a Scottish term for an orgy, as in the "Ball o' Kirriemuir"), are essentially carnival occasions for the abrogation of sexual and social taboos. Oragenitalism figures in them as the ultimate daredevilry, as in the similar erotic initiation ceremonies of the American motorcycle/horsemen gang, the "Hell's Angels."

All these recitations, and earlier similar songs, feature a striking catalogue of the names or "monickers" of the freaks and other outcasts present, and some of the rough horseplay at the "ball." This is in direct line of descent from a Scottish original that has stayed alive in America as "The Hoboes' Convention," given in George Milburn's The Hobo's Hornbook (New York, 1930), with a highly dysphemistic Negro version recorded as a toast by Bruce Jackson, No. 57, followed by the very similar "Junkies' Ball," No. 58. Another strain was carried by British emigrants to Australia in the 19th century, where it still lives on as "The Bullockies Ball," printed in Bill Wannan's Robust, Ribald and Rude Verse in Australia (Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1972) pp. 33-34. Wannan also notes the intermediate form, a British music-hall ditty of the 1850's, "The Cadgers' Ball," included in Joe Labern's Popular Comic Song Book (London, 1852); and the only mildly Australianized "Moggy's Wedding" in Charles Thatcher's Colonial Minstrel and Colonial Songster in the 1860's, reprinted by Wannan, pp. 78-79. The Scottish original of all these is the remarkable "The Blythesome Wedding," beginning: "Fy, let us all to the Bridal," in James Watson's Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems (1706; reprint Glasgow, 1869) I. 8-10, which was stated by Alex-

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ander Campbell in 1798 to be the "first of the Sangs of the [Scottish] Lowlands to be met with in print." Only coarse, rather than purposely repellent in the style of its modern descendants, this introduces its guests in such lines as:

And there will be Happer-ars'd Nansie
and Fairie-fac'd Jeanie be name,
Gleed Katie and fat-lugged Lisie,
the Lass with the gauden wamb.

It then continues with a riotous catalogue of the foods consumed, an element retained only in the Australian "Bullockies' Ball," where the foods are also defiled in a free-for-all fight, which replaces any sexual orgy.

This article is ©1976 by G. Legman and is used by permission.

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