Kid Stuff
I attended what we called “Elementary School” from 1st to 3rd grades at Pearl Spann Elementary School in Jackson, Mississippi. At one point the city of Jackson built a new elementary school, Hattie Casey Elementary, and I switched to it for grades 4 through 6.
Both schools were constructed as “white” schools to handle Jackson’s growing population in the post-World War II years. So much for Brown v. Board of Education. And, surprisingly (to me at least) both schools are listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Neither has notable architecture AFAIK, so I don’t know why that is. Both Susie Pearl Spann and Hattie Casey had been teachers in Jackson.
Why do we remember things from long ago? Apparently “memorability research” is a thing: ‘Sometimes a memory will lie dormant for decades, and then spontaneously reappear in our minds. Scientists call these experiences “involuntary autobiographical memories,” and they’re not exactly sure why they happen.’
As long as I can remember ;-) I can recall a nonsense poem that I think I learned “on the playground” sometime in elementary school – I don’t remember if it was Spann or Casey. But it has stuck with me all these years. A while back I had the idea to set this poem to music, somewhat in the spirit of John Lennon’s taking phrases from a circus poster to write the song Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!. I also thought I’d create a wild and crazy arrangement of my song and record it as a kind of homage to The Beatles’ version of their song. As can happen with grand ambitions, this high bar that I set for myself resulted in lots of inaction for many months. So recently I lost patience with myself and decided to just record it and move on. And here it is (click the image to listen.):
In the process of copyrighting the song, I wanted to make sure that, if the writer of the poem was known, that I gave proper attribution to him or her. So down the internet rabbit hole I went, a little bit anyway. I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that lots of people know this poem and that there are a variety of versions; the one that I remember is but one of many. And although I decided to title the song “Ladies and Gentlemen Jellyfish Too”, which I just thought was funny and good as a title, the most common title of the poem seems to be “Two Dead Boys”. Even more interesting, I found this bit of history, suggesting that the poem may have origins as early as the 15th century:
The British Columbia Folklore Society has an entire page dedicated to the poem One Fine Day In The Middle Of The Night, and offers this information about the poem:
“As to the history of “One Fine Day…” it appears to have evolved from tangle-worded couplets that have been popular in Miracle Plays and the folklore and folksongs of the British Isles since the Middle Ages. Tiddy, in his book The Mummers’ Play [1923, Oxford, Oxford University Press], cites the earliest known example of this type of humour as appearing in the manuscript of Land of Cockaigne about 1305 [Tiddy 1923, p. 116] and a 15th century manuscript in the Bodleian Library [MS Engl. poet. e. 1: c.1480] includes four lines that are directly related to our rhyme.
Given all this backstory, I feel comfortable attributing the lyrics to “anonymous” and not worrying that I am guilty of intellectual property theft.
Do any of you know this poem, or a variant thereof? I will be very surprised if none of you have. And yet, I suspect that, of those of you who do know it, our paths have never crossed. How is it that we know this same (or similar) poem? Apparently, it has been passed along, not only across the ocean, but also across centuries. I learned without the benefit of TikTok, email, Facebook, or WhatsApp. It was not a meme in the modern sense. So I guess we’ve never actually needed all that fancy electronic connectedness to get the good stuff to travel around the world.
Thanks for listening, and I hope that y’all have had a splendid time. After all, it was guaranteed.
