Gopher Guts and Army Trucks: The Modern Evolution of Children's Folk Rhymes

The objective of this paper is to show that while the basic forms of North American children's folk rhymes have remained the same throughout the century the content has been continually altering, revealing children's awareness of changing cultural and societal mores, and that therefore the rhymes represent a vital and living aspect of folklore.This paper is an offshoot of fieldwork done from 1992 to 1994 in the United States and Canada during the preparation of a book, Greasy Grimey Gopher Guts: The Subversive Folklore of Children, co-written with T.K.F.Weisskopf and published by August House in 1995.The majority of informants were children between the ages of five and sixteen, though adult contributions were also solicited to show how the rhymes have altered over the years. 1 The method of collecting involved giving informants such key phrases as "Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts," which generally quickly triggered folk rhyme responses.Some rhymes were collected in schools or libraries, others were solicited over the Internet; the latter process let us reach otherwise unreachable informants in Alaska and Hawaii.Certain rhymes, including "The Hearse Song," also known as "The Worms Crawl In, the Worms Crawl Out," and "Glory, Glory Hallelujah/Teacher Hit Me With a Ruler," were known by all informants and date to at least the beginning of this century.Variations have, of course, emerged over the generations as rhymes are heard, misheard or misremembered, then passed on to other children, who do their own mishearings and misrememberings.As the rhymes were collected, one not unexpected fact about these variations emerged.As is true of more formal teaching tales, the folk rhymes, in addition to being entertaining, help children deal with an increasingly volatile world.Therefore, the more modern the alteration to the rhyme, the more graphic the violent content of the rhyme becomes or the more vivid the sexual imagery.Granted, such alterations are not necessarily a recent process, and a certain amount of national mindset does seem to come into play, a case in point being the World War II era children's rhyme based on the song, "Whistle While You Work," from the 1937 Disney movie,

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