Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?

Subject: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: GUEST,Emily
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 04:28 PM

Does anyone know if Roll Your Leg Over is Public Domain? I haven't been able to find any copyright information anywhere. Thanks so much!

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: Joe_F
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 06:28 PM

It dates back to a time when it is hard to imagine anyone daring to claim authorship of it. Then, of course, there is also the difficulty that different stanzas have different anonymous authors.

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: Charley Noble
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 07:12 PM

Oscar Brand copyrighted most all the bawdy songs, including this, one but I wouldn't necessarily worry about it.

Charley Noble

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 15 Mar 10 - 08:27 PM

English traditional song, sometimes known as 'Knife in the Window' has verse;

Oh me britches are tight and I cannot undo them,
Repeat.
There's a knife on the window love, love take it to them.

Refrain
Lay your Leg Over me,
Over me do.

If thet's the one it's in public domain.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: Goose Gander
Date: 16 Mar 10 - 01:19 PM

This song was recently discussed on a thread here, if this one isn't in the public domain, then nothing is.

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 16 Mar 10 - 05:42 PM

Thre's a rich history of "If all the girls.....Then I'd be". This particular one doesn't seem to have surfaced, as far as I can tell, before 1940 or so.

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: Joe_F
Date: 16 Mar 10 - 07:56 PM

While I was at Caltech, ca. 1957, I added:

I wish all them ladies was linear spaces
I'd be a vector -- I'd be in their bases.

I hereby dedicate it to the public domain.

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 16 Mar 10 - 09:36 PM

OK, Joe F.
If not him, who wants to lay claim to it?

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: GUEST
Date: 16 Mar 10 - 10:55 PM

I actually checked and as far as I can tell Oscar Brand does not have copyright, or at least it isn't listed as his at HFA...

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 17 Mar 10 - 04:38 AM

"Thre's a rich history of "If all the girls.....Then I'd be". This particular one doesn't seem to have surfaced, as far as I can tell, before 1940 or so." Dick Greenhaus ===

WHICH particular one, Dick? There are 4 versions collected by Sharp 1903-6 in James Reeves, The Idiom Of The People, 1958, under heading Hares On The Mountain; none contains the actual words 'Roll leg over', but all the cut·stitches/tumble·fumble content is there.

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 17 Mar 10 - 04:45 AM

... tho should add that the "Lay the leg over me" as chorus, which I presume is what Dick was referring to, does not appear to belong to these turn of 19/20C versions, which much more go with the 'Whack fol-de-diddle-i-do' type chorus. Is that the recent[ish] addition you ref'd to, Dick?

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: Lighter
Date: 17 Mar 10 - 09:51 AM

"Roll Your Leg Over" is distinguishable by

1. its virtually unchanging melody (clearly related to earlier ones),

2. the refrain "Roll your leg over, roll your leg over, / Roll your over the man in the moon."

3. randomly arranged verses (often numerous) of a more verbally ingenious, less traditional, more "urban-industrial" kind, suggesting a university or military origin. (The knife-in-the-window narrative has completely disappeared.)

The earliest ref. I can find to it is from the U.S. during WWII. Brand recorded it as the very first track of Volume I of "Bawdy Songs and Backroom Ballads," released in 1955. Not long after, he recorded more stanzas on Volume III.

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: Lighter
Date: 17 Mar 10 - 10:36 AM

Joe, it looks like you're the author of a folksong (or a folk verse).

Norah Labiner's 1998 novel, "Our Sometime Sister," has,

"If all the young ladies were linear spaces, and I were a vector I'd intersect their bases."

Congratulations!

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: GUEST,allan s
Date: 17 Mar 10 - 02:22 PM

I heard it back in 1951   U- Conn

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 17 Mar 10 - 02:34 PM

See thread on "Pretty Polly," linked above in post by by Goose Gander.

Subject: RE: Origins: Roll Your Leg Over Public Domain?
From: Joe_F
Date: 17 Mar 10 - 06:11 PM

allan: The song, or the linear-algebra stanza?