"mama got shot by GI Joe"

During one of my after-school conversations with Ms. G, she expressed her curiosity for the origin of the chants our students sing while playing clapping games. These chants seem to spread to the most remote NYC neighborhoods. The following is a fragment from one of the rhymes I ‘ve heard my students chant. What's really amazing is that every child in that age range that I've met knows this chant. My best guess is that it was created by a teenage mother and that it was probably made up no later than the early 90’s because of its Barney reference. But I still can't explain why it's so wide spread, perhaps a branch of sociology can be created to study this phenomena...he he

“Mama Mama can’t you see…
What the baby’s done to me
Took away my MTV, now I’m watching Barney
Tic-Tac Toe three in a row…..
Mama got shot by GI Joe”

Talking about this also made me remember some of the chants I used to say as a kid. I don’t think I really knew what they were about, but that doesn’t make them less inappropriate. I can’t remember too many in English since I didn’t didn’t learn English until I was a pre-teen (this site seems to have a lot of them including “down down baby”). In Spanish I still remember a bunch along with the hand motions. Some of my favorites were mariquita abusadora, la caraqueña, las cortinas del palacio, matarile, pollito pleibi, el juego de la vaca and el gallo.

::sigh:: those were simpler times :-)


mdl