Hello, Michael, I've sent you my email address as I am interested in reading more about this song.

As a bit of a digression, I'm curious if you and others think that the children's taunts about killing their teachers may have their bases in these "cruel mother" songs. For instance, these lines in
Fergie 12 Mar 04 - 08:18 AM's post:

The rope was pulled and she got hung
we la, we la, wall la,
and that old woman she wasn't very good
Round and round her body swung
down by the river Sáile

-snip-

remind me of this contemporary American rhyme:

Joy To The World
Joy to the world
our teacher's dead.
We barbecued her head.
What happened to her body?
We flushed it down the potty
And around and around it goes.
And around and around it goes.
And round and round and round it goes.
-Sara P.)Anglo-American),recited at Catholic middle school, Dayton, Ohio (mid to late 1990s); collected by Azizi Powell,September, 2005

**
And yes, I know that there are probably lots of songs that have lines about something going "round and round". I'm wondering about any possible connection between these "killing the teacher, principal" type rhymes and these United Kingdom "cruel mother" rhymes. For what it's worth, in my research to date, I haven't found any examples of these violent teacher taunts among African American children [from predominately or all Black schools]. And I'm curious if one reason for this could be the difference in cultural traditions that came from the UK and not only differences in cultural traditions between the two populations (European-American and African Americana) in the USA.

**

Also, a lot of versions of American handclap rhyme "Down By The Bank of the Hanky Panky" have as their first line "Down by the riverside hanky panky". I thought that the singers might have gotten the word "riverside" from the African American spiritual [Gonna lay down my sword and shield". Now I'm wondering if that word "riverside" in that widely known rhyme-which is played as a competitive handclap by childen, teens,and young adults-may have come from that "River Saile".

See this comment from MartinRyan 10 Mar 04 - 01:45 PM

"Dunno about erudition but I can give you a plausible derivation:

..down by the river-side, la (weak syllable to improve scansion)"...

-snip-

Of course,I realize that we'll never know, but I just wanted to through that into the mix. See this post I wrote for more on the origin of that rhyme: thread.cfm?threadid=94034#1815711
Origins: Down by the Banks of the Hanky Panky