One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

“Two Dead Boys”, folk rhyme

2ddboysContents:

 

First of all we must apologise to our many readers, particularly to those of you who have taken the time to write to us with your variants, for the delay in updating these pages. Looking back, however, the delay has given us the opportunity to more fully review your letters which, in turn, has allowed us to cite more line variants that you have sent in. This has also given us the material we have needed to come to some tentative conclusions about the rhyme – or rhymes.

This particular page of the British Columbia Folklore Society’s web site was begun following an article that we ran in the experimental first issue of the Society’s Newsletter (April 2001)—and not in the Society Journal B.C. FOLKLORE, as previously stated—in which we cited four, composite verses of the “Two Dead Boys” rhyme instigated by a variant told to us by David Fleetwood of Cowichan Station. David was born in British Columbia in 1929 and worked as a cat-skinner in logging camps for most of his life. He remembered his grandfather reciting the poem but said his own recollection of it was not complete. After checking out various sources, including the Opies [the authors Iona and Peter] and the Web, we compiled and published the four, composite verses given below and asked our readers for any further input.

The folklorist and writer Ed Cray, writing to others on an Internet ballad chat line, noted that the rhyme was a “Ballad of Impossibilities” and that, “A number of these songs/ballads of impossibilities were printed as broadsides in the 18th and 19th centuries. At least one, The Derby Ram is/was well known in the 20th Century, and Peggy Seeger introduced another during the folk song revival, Little Brown Dog, culled from her mother’s anthology of Animal Folk Songs for Children.”

Professor Cray then asks, “Can anyone provide, first, a tune for the children’s rhyme “One Fine Day” and thus turn a poem into a song; and, second, can members of the list provide references to other songs of impossibilities?”