LadyJean,

Thanks so much for sharing that version of "There Were Three Jolly Fishermen". I had never heard that version before.

As a child or teen -eons ago-I learned the "Amsterdam" version.
Some camp counselors taught my daughter and her friends the same version of "...Jolly Fisherman" that I had learned. We sang it this way:

"They all went down to Amster-SHSS*
Amster-SHSS
They all went down to Amster-shss
Amster-SHSS
Amster Amster SHSS SHSS SHSS
Amster Amster SHSS SHSS SHSS
They all went down to Amster-SHSS"

* 'shss' is the sound you make when you want to tell people to be quiet. While singing this word in that song [and usually when this word is said in other instances] it is accompanied with the gesture of holding a finger to the middle of your mouth and then quickly taking it away.

-snip-

Note that every verse of that song has a call & response like element in it, though the entire group sang each line in unison. I wonder if non-Black kids also sung it this way?

In the version that I learned and in my daughter's version, the next verse was:

"We must not say that naughty word
naughty word
We must not say that naughty word
naughty word
Naughty naughty word word word
Naughty naughty word word word
We must not say that naughty word.

-snip-

In the 1980s, at a summer camp where she taught, my daughter heard these two additional verse to this song:

We're gonna say it any how
any how
We're gonna say it any how
Any how
Any any how how how
Any any how how how
We're gonna say it anyhow

They all went down to Amster-DAM
Amster-DAM
They all went down to Am-ster-DAM
Amster-DAM
Amster Amster DAM DAM DAM
Amster Amster DAM DAM DAM
They all went down to Amster-DAM

-snip-

****

You know, come to think of it, I always associated the three jolly fishermen with three of Jesus' disciples {I know that this isn't Biblically accurate-but I always thought those fishermen were "Matthew, Mark, and Luke" and I wondered why they had gone off and left John}. Also, I always wondered how those Middle Eastern men knew anything about that city in Holland.

Does anyone know what the original line of that song was?
Maybe DAM-ASS-CUSS was the original distination but am-ster-DAM was substituted for it because the first word was tooo obviously naughty. I mean kids [and other singers] could claim that they were talking about the dams that held back water in Holland when they sang Amsterdam. But what almost plausible denial could they have for repeatedly singing "DAM-ASS-CUSS". It would have been too over the top, and some kids would have gotten punished if their parents or other adults had heard them singing that version.

I have to confess that though I love the Damascus version of that song, for the sake of the kids' "behinds", I won't be sharing it at any game song sessions I facilitate.

Not to mention that I don't wanna get fussed at by those kids' parents and other adults who may not 'get' that we're just having fun with words...