I attended elementary school in a bedroom community about 60 miles north of NYC. So these may be eastern songs. I don't know. Maybe someone else will remember them and post info in "the girls' thread" ;-)

What you say about the lack of unsupervised play really disturbs me and saddens me. If kids can't learn songs from each other, than maybe folk music really is on the way to becoming a relic of the past.

After all, they are a subculture without much power to determine their own destinies, and they (at least until they are 8 or 9 or so) are not fluent readers, so they, too, like the miners and farmers of Apalachia whom Lomax studied, must pass their culture on by word of mouth...

And I remember years ago (but not as long ago as when I learned the above songs) reading a National Geogragraphic article about the importance of play for mammals (though I did a search of Nationalgeographic.com and I can't find the article in their archives). The article started out by mentioning the somewhat startling finding that the common denominatior among people who "snap" and go into their workplace shooting off rifles wasn't poverty or even physical abuse by a parent or guardian, it was that these people were denied the oportunity for free, unsupervised play... (I wish I could find that article!)