MOTHER, MAY I GO OUT TO SWIM

Mother, may I go out to swim?
Yes, my darling daughter,
Hang your clothes on a hick'ry limb,
But don't go near the water.

She hung her clothes on a hickory limb,
And Johnny hung his up too,
So him and her they romped and played
Like young folks always do.

I am too young and I ain't fit
To diddle a growed-up gentleman yet.
You're big enough, and built just right,
I'd like to diddle you every night.

Sung as above by a lady in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, January 7, 1952. She heard it about 1900, in Garland County, Arkansas. Only the first stanza is reported in polite sources, as by F. W. Baugh, Marius Barbeau, and the Wintembergs, in their important collection, "Canadian Folklore from Ontario," in Journal of American Folklore (1918) vol. XXXI: pp. 1-179, at pp. 55, and 115-16. See a similar opening stanza in Randolph's Ozark Folksongs (1950) vol. IV: p. 400, No. 873; ed. Cohen (1982) pp. 388-89, as "The Alphabet Song," to which it forms the introduction; the singer, Mrs. May Kennedy McCord writing (1939): "My father learned. . . this song, more than ninety years ago. There were many verses, some not at all suitable for children to sing." The spelled-out alphabet served as the chorus.
Compare the same isolated opening "jingle" in Brown, North Carolina Folklore (1952) vol. III: p. 376. This is international: the Opies, No. 360, cite a personal British version of (again) the first stanza only, as a nursery rhyme in Walter de la Mare's last book, The Scarecrow (1945), with the variant line 3:
"Fold your clothes up neat and trim." To this, the young lady being addressed objects: "The rhyme I know,' said Letitia, `is, Hang your clothes on a hickory limb.'" Clearly, that is the one De la Mare (born in Kent in 1873) knew too, in the 1870s or 80s.

Source: Roll Me In Your Arms: "Unprintable" Ozark Folksongs and Folklore, Volume 1 (Vance Randolph, 1992)

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