Songs My Grandmother Taught Me

No, really…

Back in the 60s, when I was first captivated by folk music, it was almost obligatory for folk club performers to introduce a song as “a song I learned from my grandmother”, though it was widely suspected, as someone (Steve Benbow, perhaps?) said at that time*, that “most of those grandmothers live in the library at Cecil Sharp House.”

As it happens, my grandmother really had been something of a musician in her youth: I think her weapon of choice was the accordion or a related free-reed aerophone**, but she hadn’t owned or played one in many years when I knew her. Still, we did, for a while, play harmonica duets together, and she was certainly no beginner on that instrument. I don’t remember what we actually played, but she did teach me a couple of songs, though I’m not able to reveal a shining rediscovered example of a major ballad, sadly.

Please excuse the rather random music notation. I’m not very music-literate at the best of times, and I haven’t quite got to grips with the software I’m using yet.

Ain’t No Bugs On Me

An abbreviated version of this part of the article was published in the issue of Folk In Cornwall for January-March 2024.

One was a song that was certainly known in the early-ish 20th Century in the South of the US under the names “It ain’t gonna rain no more” or “There ain’t no bugs on me”, not least from a version rewritten by Fiddlin’ John Carson. As it’s long been popular among lovers of Americana, I’ve heard and seen so many verses to it, that I’ve mostly forgotten now which verses Gran knew, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t include Carson’s famous verse about Ku Klux Klan, so I’ve no idea now how she came across them. However, a version by Wendell Holmes, which recycles a number of floating verses but for which he claimed authorship, was a hit in the 1920s in the UK (where it became a popular football song) as well as the US, so it’s not unlikely that she heard it around that time. That version is now out of copyright, but in any case, the song had, according to Carl Sandburg’s The American Songbag, been around in various versions since the 1870s if not earlier.

The short dance song version published by Sandburg seems to come (like many of the songs in the Songbag) from the collection of Nebraska-born poet and collector of songs Edwin Ford Piper (1871-1939), who believed it had found its way West from Kentucky and thereabouts. It has a less flippant lyric than the versions now commonly heard, but uses (more or less) the same tune.

It ain’t gonna rain, it ain’t gonna snow,
It ain’t gonna rain no mo’;
Come on ev’rybody now,
Ain’t gonna rain no mo’.

Oh, what did the blackbird say to the crow?
It ain’t gonna rain no mo’,
Ain’t gonna hail, ain’t gonna snow,
Ain’t gonna rain no mo

Bake them biscuits good and brown,
It ain’t gonna rain no mo’.
Swing yo’ ladies round and round,
Ain’t gonna rain no mo’

My grandmother did remember this chorus or something very similar (it’s very common!):

It ain’t gonna rain no more, no more
It ain’t gonna rain no more
So how the hell can the old folks tell
It ain’t gonna rain no more

She also had this (also common) alternative chorus:

It ain’t gonna rain no more, no more
It ain’t gonna rain no more
So how the heck can a man wash his neck
If it ain’t gonna rain no more?

That Ku Klux Klan verse from Fiddlin’ John Carson goes:

The night was dark and dreary
And the air was full of sleet
The old man joined the Ku Klux Klan
And ma, she lost her sheet.

That verse probably took some courage to sing in those days, and it may not be much better now. It parodies a verse from the Wendell Holmes version:

The night was dark and dreary
And the air was full of sleet,
When the old man stood out in the storm
And his shoes were full of feet!

Carson’s version also took a swing at the evolution controversy with this verse, which I haven’t seen elsewhere:

Monkeys swing by the end of their tails
And jump from tree to tree
There may be monkey in some of you guys,
But there ain’t no monkey in me

Here is a motley selection of other verses from various sources:

The June bug comes in the month of June
The lightning bug comes in May
The bed bug comes at any old time
But he ain’t a-going to stay

Sometimes the maybug (cockchafer beetle) is named instead of the lightning bug (firefly, glow worm). Both bugs are beetles, as are June bugs, in case you were wondering. Given current concerns about the possible spread of the Cimex bed bug and the difficulties of dealing with an infestation, it would be interesting to know what measures the singer was planning to use!

Mosquitos they fly high
Mosquitos they fly low
If that old skeeter lands on me
He ain’t gonna fly no more

A peanut sat on a railroad track
Its heart was all a-flutter
Along there came a railroad train
Toot toot! Peanut butter…

A bum sat by a sewer
And by that sewer he died
And at the coroner’s inquest
They called it ‘sewer side’

Now the big bugs have little bugs
Upon their backs to bite ’em
And little bugs have smaller bugs
And so ad infinitum

You may recognize this as a variation of de Morgan’s adaptation of a verse by Jonathan Swift that originally referred to fleas. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fleas]

The Knocker Up

“The Knocker Up” is probably older and is certainly more ‘English’ – in the US, “being knocked up” has a meaning that has nothing to do with the story behind this song, as related by David Niven. He claimed (if I remember correctly) in The Moon’s A Balloon to have fallen foul of it on a Transatlantic liner, when he offered to ‘knock up’ a female fellow passenger. It’s been suggested by some of his contemporaries, however, that he was not averse to exaggerating for comic effect or even claiming that anecdotes concerning other people were about him, so who knows?

This particular song, however, refers more sedately if somewhat obliquely to the times when an alarm clock would have been a luxury item. A knocker up would walk through the streets in the early morning tapping on workers’ bedroom windows with a stick, to ensure that they made it to the mill or the pit on time for their day’s work. There are a number of serious, modern-ish songs that refer to this occupation, such as Mike Canavan’s “The Knocker Up Man” and Ted Edwards’ “Coal Hole Cavalry”. Both those songs are mentioned in a Mudcat thread at https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=79341. (I note from that thread that Niven was not the only person to have been embarrassed by his ignorance of the American idiom.)

While I was writing this piece, I couldn’t help wondering how the knocker up got up in time to perform his task, and that Mudcat thread includes a snippet that poses the same question. The Lancashire Mining Museum quotes a tongue-twister from that period that gives an answer, and the article also has plenty of other relevant information and illustrations.

We had a knocker-up, and our knocker-up had a knocker-up
And our knocker-up’s knocker-up didn’t knock our knocker up, up
So our knocker-up didn’t knock us up ‘Cos he’s not up.

https://lancashireminingmuseum.org/2017/09/07/who-knocked-up-the-knocker-upper/

As does this article: https://www.geriwalton.com/knocker-up/

The song my grandmother remembered described a less formal arrangement, with deliberate comic effect.

A pal of mine once said to me
“Will you wake me up at half past three?”
So I went by at half past one,
Tapped at the window and said, “Oh, John,
I’ve just come round to tell you,
Just come round to tell you,
Just come round to tell you
You’ve two more hours to sleep.”

The tune is very well known: variations have been used for sea songs, children’s songs, rugby songs and much else under various titles such as ‘Early In The Morning’. However, in folk clubs – the ones I’ve visited, anyway – it is probably best known as the song ‘William Brown’ or ‘Keep That Wheel A-Turning’, first published by the Independent Labour Party in 1927 with words by Arthur Hagg, with additional verses by Bill Keable. According to the version I first heard, William turned out so much product that the market slumped, the price fell, and William was sacked. A similar version can be found on Mudcat: https://mudcat.org/@displaysong.cfm?SongID=3362. (That thread also includes a version of the same song that my Grandmother knew, along with some other fragments.)

The verses by Bill Keable tell us that the company became so profitable that it was sold to another company, and again, William was sacked. https://oursubversivevoice.com/song/12320/

*Probably in an interview in English Dance and Song. Oddly enough, I think I may have seen a version of There Ain’t No Bugs On Me in another edition of ED&S, but I haven’t seen those magazines in several decades.

**Aerophones comprise a wide-ranging group of instruments (and actually includes the harmonica), but I suspect that my grandmother played either a piano accordion, button accordion, or melodeon. Or possibly more than one. Sadly, it’s more than 50 years too late to ask her. There’s also a range of digital wind instruments marketed by Roland under the name Aerophone, but I don’t know what she would have made of those. Perhaps she’d have loved them: I quite fancy a closer look at one, but it’s a long time since I played anything woodwind…

*** As it happens, I knew Mike Canavan when I lived in Manchester for a while in the 1970s. He was, as I recall, a fine songwriter, but apart from his Knocker Up Man. I (mis)remember with some affection a song of his including a terse verse about the River Irk, which empties unobtrusively into the Irwell. Despite the verse’s brevity, there’s a line I can’t remember, but the last one was to the effect of ‘your leaping, bounding waters are in places six feet wide’. He did release an album called Some Songs on the Smile label that included Knocker Up Man, but I don’t think the Irk song was on it.

In fact, I learn from Sam Simmons that Charles Menteith recalls the river song as being about the Douglas, not the Irk. Apparently the Douglas (or Asland or Astland) also flows through Manchester, but I wasn’t familiar with it, and I don’t remember the rest of the song at all. I’m not inclined to argue with someone who actually sang the song, so I suspect that it was both rivers got a mention at some point. Still, the Douglas was apparently navigable by small craft at one time, which suggests that it may have been wider than six feet, at least in places!