Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Somebody once told me if a memory, apropos of nothing, pops up in your head it means the brain cell that was holding it died and the memory is floating around in your head looking for a new cellular home.
Sounds plausible to me.
I figure that’s where a weird memory, weird words, came floating into my head the other Saturday morning.
“Wadat in chew, Wadat in chew. Ishbilly oaten doaten, bobo ske deet in doten Wadat in chew…”
These are some of the words to a hand clapping, foot stompin’, call and response song we scouts sang around the ol’ campfire on camping trips.
It was one of the weirder songs we sang.
I could never remember all the words.
We had quite the repertoire of campfire songs in our ol’ scout troop back in those Blue Ridge Mountains.
My favorite was “The Doughnut Song.”
Sung to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw” the words were:
“Oh I ran around the corner and I ran right in,
“I ran right in to the bakery shop.
“Picked up a doughnut hot from the grease,
“And threw the lady a five cent piece.
“She looked at the nickel and she looked at me,
“And she said, ‘Kind sir can’t you plainly see,
‘“There’s a hole in the nickel and it goes right through.’
“And I said, ‘There’s a hole in the doughnut too.
“Thanks for the doughnut, good night.’”
There was another one I remembered:
“Peepin’ through the knothole, on Grandpa’s wooden leg,
“Who’ll wind the clock while I’m away, away.
“Go get the ax, there’s a hair on baby’s chest.
“A boy’s best friend is his mother, his mother.”
When I got older I came to realize our leaders taught us a bunch of drinking songs.
Of course this might have something to do with they were obviously using our weekend hiking and camping trips to get away from home and drink around the campfire after all the scouts had hit the hay.
There was “I Want a Beer.” This song was a take on the 1911 song “I Want a Girl” with the words changed to,
“I want a beer, just like the beer, that pickled my old man.
“It was a grand old fashioned beer with lots of foam.
“It took six men to carry daddy home…”
There was one simply titled “The Drinking Song.”
The chorus was: “Sing glorious, sing glorious. One keg of beer for the four of us. Sing Glory be to God that there ain’t no more of us ‘cos one of us could drink it all alone.”
When my family moved to Baltimore and I joined the scouts there, the adult leaders were not amused with my campfire drinking songs.
Maybe 15 years ago I called an old leader who I heard wasn’t long for this world.
I was talking to him about our campfire songs and he went quiet.
“Those were the years George, Neil and Henry ran the troop. Their style wasn’t exactly by the book. I stepped back for a few years then,” he said.
When he said that it confirmed I was in a renegade troop.
There were other signs.
Like that time a woman came driving up to our campsite on a Saturday night and wanted to know where assistant leader Henry was.
I wondered too. He came with us to the campsite then he was gone.
Well the woman was his wife.
After that weekend we never saw Henry again.
But that’s another story.
Grant McGee writes for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him:
