Many years ago -- in the 1920s and '30s -- my mother used to sing a brief ditty to the tune of Auld Lang Syne that went:

Old Grimes is dead, that good old man,
We ne'er shall see him more.
He used to wear an old brown coat
All buttoned down before.

Does this ring any bells anywhere? It's apparently not related to the folk-song "Bill Grimes," even though the phrase "Old Grimes is dead" appears in both.

My mother's early years, until 1893, were spent in Manitoba, and she later was house mother at an Episcopal orphanage in Chicago. She might have picked up the ditty in either of those two places... or anywhere in between.