Epsiode 28: Miss Mary Mack

In episode number 28 of the "A Tisket-Tasket" podcast, the host Gina discusses the nursery rhyme and clapping song, "Miss. Mary Mack." She delves into the history of "Miss Mary Mack," its various lyrics, and its popularity as a hand-clapping game. Gina explores possible origins, including an African-American circus performer and the American Civil War. She also discusses the dark history of circuses in the United States and their connection to African-American culture. The episode ends with a call to continue studying and preserving nursery rhymes as they hold significant historical value. Visit "A Tisket-Tasket" website and blog at atiskettasketpodcast.com. 

 #NurseryRhymes, #ClappingSong, #AmericanFolklore, #HistoryPreservation, #AfricanAmericanCulture, #CircusHistory, #HandClappingGames, #AmericanCivilWar, #FolkloreAficionados, #FascinatingHistory, #CulturalTraditions, #NurseryRhymeOrigins, #OralTradition, #PodcastEpisodes, #FolkloreResearch, #Storytelling, #NurseryRhymeHistory, #HeritageAndCulture, #DarkHistoryOfCircuses, #AfricanAmericanPerformers, #AmericanSouth, #AmericanCivilWarHistory, #FolkloreStudies, #PortlandConference, #WeirdestNurseryRhymes, #HistoricalSignificance, #EducationThroughPodcasts

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to episode number 28 of the "A Tisket-Tasket"  podcast. I'm your host, Gina. And today, we are going to talk about the nursery rhyme and clapping song, "Ms. Mary Mack." First, I want to thank you all for your patience because I didn't have a voice for a couple of weeks, and it's really hard to record a podcast when you don't have a voice.

I want to give a huge thank you to my friend, Michael, who stepped in and did an absolutely fantastic job as the host. He's a good friend of mine and has an absolutely wonderful voice. I thought he just did a great job. I hope to have him help with this podcast in the future, perhaps reading some nursery rhymes for me or just having a conversation.

Secondly, as Michael stated, I am absolutely thrilled that I was accepted to speak at the American Folklore Society's conference in Portland, Oregon. My talk covers exploring the ways nursery rhymes preserve history in unique ways. Please visit my website, taskitpodcast.com, in the description to learn more about my talk and find out ways you can support me to get to Portland. In any case, let's go ahead and get started on today's subject: "Ms. Mary Mack."

"Ms. Mary Mack" has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 11,498. No one really knows where the song originated; however, it was first published in 1888 in a book called "Counting Rhymes for Children" by Henry Carrington Bolton and was collected in Westchester, Pennsylvania. It is reported to be known in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, and New Zealand. If you've heard of it from another country, please let me know. I'm always very curious.

According to Kira Daniella Gaunt and her book "The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double Dutch to Hip Hop," it is known as the most common hand-clapping game in the English-speaking world.

To refresh your memory, I'm going to go ahead and state the traditional lyrics of this nursery rhyme. It's also really hard to say without the clapping, so I'll do my best, but here it goes:
"Ms. Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,
All dressed in black, black, black,
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons,
All down her back, back, back.
She asked her mother, mother, mother,
For fifty cents, cents, cents,
To see the elephants, elephants, elephants,
Jump over the fence, fence, fence.
They jumped so high, high, high,
They reached the sky, sky, sky,
And didn't or never came back, back, back,
Till the 4th of July, lie, lie."

There are different versions as well, and you can check out some of the additional lyrics on my blog. Now, the game is played with two children or more, clapping on those words, and that's why those words are repeated. I talked a little bit more about the structure of these clapping songs in an earlier episode with Patty cake.

In the original publication by Henry Carrington Bolton in 1888, the lyrics are as follows and are a bit different:
"It is Ms. Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,
Dressed in black, black, black,
Silver buttons, buttons, buttons,
Down her back.
I love coffee, I love tea,
I love the boys, and the boys love me.
I tell my mom when she comes home,
The boys won't leave the girls alone."

Now, let's go ahead and listen to a couple of different audio versions of this nursery rhyme.

The first version I want to play for you is by Ella Jenkins, and it's her singing with children. This nursery rhyme is a very traditional clapping back song. I'll go ahead and play this for you now.

[Audio clip]

As you can see, this is what I would consider a traditional version with children playing along and repeating the lyrics. The second version is a modern recording that I found on SoundCloud by user Montessori Garden out of Seattle, Washington. It is the song in its entirety, but it doesn't have a second voice or a call for clap backs. I wanted to play a modern version. The original version I played by Ella Jenkins is from the 1970s, and this one was from the last couple of years. But here we are.

[Audio clip]

Now that you've listened to some versions, you can see how these played out as different games. Now, I want to go into the meat of this nursery rhyme and talk about the lyrics, the symbolism, and the meaning.

There was another audio clip that I wanted to play for you. This is a recording from teacher Gertrude Westfell in 1977 in Chicago, Illinois. She is a teacher of inner-city school children in Chicago. However, I couldn't enhance the audio enough to play it. But this is a fantastic insight into teaching language skills to young children through song. Westfell calls this "spontaneous expression." I will, of course, post this audio on the blog so you can listen to it in its entirety. It's about 30 minutes long.

Now, when I was studying literacy and rhetoric as a Ph.D. student, we called this discussion "code switching." That is, switching the type of language, words, or dialect you use to fit better into a community. Westfell was talking about this in her early recordings. She goes on to say that she used clapping songs and folk tales to help her children learn language skills in dialect. She shares a fantastic anecdote about herself struggling to learn German in college. She grew up in a first-generation American household, speaking German at home with her parents. Yet when she took the course in college, hoping for an easy A, she recalled it as one of the hardest classes she ever took because the course structure was set up to teach stricter, more formal dialect and grammar. The difference between High German versus Low German. She likens this experience to the African-American children learning English at home through one dialect and then having to learn an entirely new dialect and set of skills in schools. I apologize if I don't use the language correctly. I do not want to come off as racist or classist, but here she's talking about inner-city children who are generally from a poor socioeconomic class. She refers to them as immigrants from the South and talks about their dialect as Southern lower-class African-American dialect transforming into the American standard dialect that we force all children to learn in American schools.

I personally thought this was a fascinating look into learning languages as a whole. Westfell goes on to say that clap-back songs and other nursery rhymes echo African-American and Southern American dialects to make it an easier transition. There's a wonderful book called "The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double Dutch to Hip Hop," published in 2006 by NYU Press, written by Kira Danielle Gaunt, which discusses the same phenomenon. I admit that I'm not an expert on linguistics or African American Vernacular English (AAVE), but I thought that this perspective was interesting, given the strong connection to African-American culture in clapping nursery rhymes, which I'll talk about in a minute. But let's jump back to talk about the nursery rhyme specifically.

Ms. Mary Mack is thought to have originated in the American South and may actually be based on a real person. She may have been one of the first females to perform in an all African-American-owned circus in the 1800s, which was incredibly rare. As a performer, she was known for her many fashions, and the lines with silver buttons down her back may refer to her ensemble, which apparently had big buttons and a lot of frills. The elephants jumping the fence may refer to the use of elephants in circuses.

However, I want to delve a bit deeper into the circus history and its specific ties to the American South and these clapping songs.

Mary Mack worked under a man named Efrim Williams, who called himself the "Black P.T. Barnum." He was an African-American circus owner in the 1800s, right around where this nursery rhyme started. A great article from the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal in 2009 highlights the fascinating history of Williams and his famous troop. For those outside of the U.S., Milwaukee is in the state of Wisconsin, which is right around the Great Lakes and part of the American Midwest. From the article: "He called himself the Black P.T. Barnum, and he survived performing before the two toughest audiences in the 19th century: opera house fans and lumberjacks. Milwaukee's Efram Williams was a showbiz legend in the late 1800s when he became the first African-American circus owner in the United States. His horses tromped through forests to bow and twirl in the Northwoods, and his acrobats flipped through the air in big city opera houses. His name eventually faded into the mist of history, but a Milwaukee troop is about to revive his story and his heritage. The African-American Gilbert and Jones troop joined the effort. Williams will appear Sunday in the Great Circus Parade, touting its own motto, 'The True Colors of the Circus World.' The group is part elegance, part clowning, all fun with a message. The article goes on to say what a story it was, starting out as a shoe-shine boy in Milwaukee. Williams began his showbiz career by training a horse to do math tricks in the early 1800s. The performance won him applause in local opera houses. Then donning a ringmaster's top hat and tux, Williams took his show on the road, eventually owning three circuses with more than 100 people. He traveled the state, a hit even in the hickory-tough camps of Northern Wisconsin. It was a great shtick that had acrobats, 85 horses, cages of tigers and zebras in 15 red, white, and blue railroad cars in the roadshow. Williams became wealthy, but a circus's final fall victim to bad weather and finances in the early 1900s."

As I researched, I found myself falling down a rabbit hole about the history of circuses in the United States, and its history is incredibly dark. It's yet another important and sad part of the tapestry of how white Americans treated African-Americans in the United States. African-Americans were a part of circuses when they became popular in the 17th and 18th centuries in the United States and were, of course, popular in England and across Europe before then. Unfortunately, African Americans were rarely prominent showmen in the circuses. They were often portrayed as sideshow freaks or relegated to menial tasks behind the scenes. There is a lot of very awful history behind circuses and the treatment of people and animals. I think it's incredibly important to talk about when discussing this nursery rhyme because clapping songs are an integral part of the history of the American South, especially among African-American culture and singing culture. I would be remiss not to acknowledge this dark part of history. Ms. Mary Mack may have taken her name from other historical contexts that were important to African-Americans at the time. I'll get to that in a minute. It could also be a song about the fact that finally, an African-American woman had prominence in the American circus. Efrim Williams was an incredibly important part of African-American and entertainment history, especially during this time when people like P.T. Barnum were exploiting people of color, people with disabilities, and women, among other things. I just wanted to comment on that. I will have a few links on my blog if you'd like to read more about race and circuses or the history of circuses.

Let's go ahead and talk a little bit more about where Ms. Mary Mack may have come from.

Interestingly, Ms. Mary Mack, in her dress of black, may not refer to a person at all. The lyrics may refer to the USS Merrimack, a steam-powered frigate launched in the American Civil War in 1855. The frigate had a black hull with silver rivets down the side, reminiscent of the nursery rhyme. Unfortunately, I could not find any stories or facts to substantiate this claim, but the song did come about during the Civil War, and the Merrimack was launched in the most important naval battle of the American Civil War before it caught on fire and had its own history. It very well could have inspired the nursery rhyme "Ms. Mary Mack."

There's also a rumor that when this nursery rhyme says "elephants jumping the fence," it is a reference to the newly formed Republican Party, previously the Whigs, jumping the Mason-Dixon line during the Civil War. Clapping games, as I've mentioned, were a big part of African-American slave culture, and the clapping game may have been brought about as a reference to the American Civil War.

If you are not American and don't learn about the American Civil War in your history books, the U.S. was famously divided by a line called the Mason-Dixon line, which separated the American North, which opposed slavery, and the Confederate states in the South that were trying to hold on to this barbaric practice.

Now, that's all I could really find about the history of "Ms. Mary Mack," but I have a theory. If this nursery rhyme came about around the American Civil War, and clapping games were purported to be very essential in African-American culture, especially slave culture, it doesn't seem like a big leap to think that this song may have originated from slaves creating a song about hope. So, if there was a warship called Ms. Merrimack or the slaves were getting word or hearing stories about slavery finally ending from the great North, it doesn't seem like a big leap to me that this nursery rhyme could have come from that. However, I may never know for sure, but this is yet another example of why nursery rhymes are incredibly important to study because they keep parts of history alive that were otherwise not written down or not studied. I think it's important to keep these traditions alive and to continue researching them.

But again, I want to thank all of you for listening to this podcast. I know I have a few new listeners because I can't help but talk about my love for this subject. I want to thank all of you for tuning in. Please check out my blog. You can find the link in the description for more information, including my reference list. And please help me get to Portland so I can give a wonderful talk to other folklore aficionados like me. In any case, join me next week, where I will continue to talk about the weirdest of nursery rhymes.