Links tend to change or get lost over time, so we encourage people to post both the link and the text of music information. Here's the Observer article Susanne linked to:

Subversive rhymes are child's play


Lottery funds will be used to research changes in playground songs and how they break taboos
Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent
Sunday December 16, 2007
The Observer

There is no shortage of words that rhyme with the name Gordon Brown. There's 'crown' and, of course, 'frown', so those who listen next time they pass a school playground may well hear the first rude children's song to feature the present Prime Minister.
Politicians, along with films stars and members of the royal family, have always been prominent in children's rhymes. Now Heritage Lottery-funded research into the changing nature of these childhood ditties is to prove just how rich the tradition remains. 'Reports of the death of the playground song are always premature,' said Michael Rosen, the children's laureate and presenter of BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth, which recently celebrated children's songs. 'These songs and rhymes run across classes and across cultures and they are often about breaking taboos. It is what you might call "subversive laughter" and it is popular, I think, because it undermines authority.'
Rosen cites one of his own favourite playground songs as the one that once used to rhyme 'underwear' with the shop 'Mothercare', then went on to swap in the name of Tony Blair. 'They will have to change that one again now,' he said.
The new lottery scheme will be organised by Malcolm Taylor, an expert in colloquial rhyme from the English Folkdance and Song Society, founded in 1911 by folklore revivalist Cecil Sharp. The project aims to encourage creativity and monitor the way in which songs have altered down the ages. Next year Taylor plans to return some of the society's archive recordings to the areas of Britain where they were originally made.
'We will be taking collections of songs and rhymes back to Lancashire, to Hampshire and back to London,' he said. 'We want to re-introduce them to the children and find out whether any have survived and in what form. In fact, we will be doing very much the same work that Cecil Sharp did at the turn of the last century.'
A key location for the planned research is a school in Rotherhithe, south London, which regularly hosted an annual Singing Games Festival in the Sixties. Next summer, part of the lottery grant will fund a revival of the festival at Redriff School and set up a reminiscence project run by Taylor. 'We want to track down many of the former pupils of the school who cut a record of children's rhymes in 1969,' he explained. 'We also want to find out what is going on in the playground there now.
'The area was predominantly white and working-class and now 43 per cent of the pupils are from other countries, so things will have changed, but I bet we will still find a lot of stuff going on,' he said.
It seems that the urge to rhyme while you play is still strong, especially among girls. Tunes are often traditional and frequently international. 'Ring-a-Ring-a Roses', for example, has gone through many reincarnations - there is a popular version in Germany about a lamb and a naughty Bosnian version about a grandfather's digestive system. Caribbean rhymes and tunes have come into London, too, since the immigration of the Sixties.
Dan Jones, a leading expert in children's rhymes, once came across a Rwandan song sung to the unmistakeable tune of 'Mary Had a Little Lamb', while other melodies are much more current, frequently culled from recent novelty pop hits, such as 'Barbie Girl', by Aqua.
Bodily functions and kissing and having babies are common preoccupations in the rhyming schemes, Jones explains, and there is often some cruel, if not homicidal, content. One lyric sung to the tune of 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' involves throwing a teacher overboard and 'listening to her scream'.

Calling the tune
From the Sixties, to the tune of 'What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?' The song emerged at the start of Coronation Street on TV:

Albert Tatlock Ena Sharples
Albert Tatlock Ena Sharples
Albert Tatlock Ena Sharples
Early in the morning

In the Seventies, adapted from the music hall song:

Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay!
My knickers flew away
They came back yesterday
From a little holiday

In the Eighties, in response to the US soap Dallas:

He's big. He's rich. His wife is a bitch
He drives a big, white carrrr
He lives in a palace in the middle of Dallas
And he calls himself JRRRRRRRR

Pop group Aqua had a hit with 'Barbie Girl' in 1997. Children in east London now use this adaptation of the song as a clapping game:

I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world
Say goodbye, never cry
Thanks for meeting you, bye bye

Also current and in reference to the Teletubbies, to the tune of 'This Old Man':

I hate you
You hate me
Tinky Winky shot Dipsy
With a great big bang
And a hole in the head
Sorry Laa Laa
Dipsy's Dead.