Origins: Jenny Jenkins

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Jenny Jenkins
From: CapriUni
Date: 12 Nov 10 - 04:51 PM

Here are some alternatives to going bare I've thought of, to amuse myself:

"Would you be mad if I wore plaid?" (Thanks to Groucho Marx!)

"I'll bounce off the wall, and wear them all!"

"I'll go crazy, and just wear paisley!"

Etc.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Jenny Jenkins
From: Joe_F
Date: 12 Nov 10 - 05:17 PM

Oh. Farm Security Administration. Having just been listening to an interview with Tom Lehrer, I wondered if the Folk Song Army actually existed. %^)

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Jenny Jenkins
From: Goose Gander
Date: 12 Nov 10 - 05:21 PM

A little more . . .

*This song was explained by Mrs. Myra Pipkin with the following rhymes:

Marry in white
You're sure to be right.

Marry in blue
You're sure to be true.

Marry in green
You're ashamed to be seen.

Marry in brown
You'll live in town.

Marry in red
You'll wish yourself dead.

Marry in black
You'll wish yourself back.

"Should always get married in white or blue -
right and true."

Source: Voices From the Dust Bowl, again.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Jenny Jenkins
From: CapriUni
Date: 12 Nov 10 - 07:13 PM

Joe F-- Now you've got me thinking of the days after 9/11 in America, and the obsession with color-coded security levels. ...I'm now wondering what that would be like with a Jenny Jenkins edition

Goose Gander:

"Dress in brown = live in town" reminds me of my Mother's stories, growing up. She grew up in NYC from the mid-1930s - 50s, and she said the native New Yorkers all wore dark browns and blacks, because that way, the soot that was in the air from all the factories and car exhaust wouldn't show on your clothes. And you could always tell the who the tourists were, because they were dressed in their pastel-colored fancy clothes.

That started to change, with the advent of the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), and the Clean Air Act. Now NYC natives are as colorful as everyone else. :-)

Of course, living in town is not necessarily a bad fate for a bride, depending on which town that ends up being (keeps that in mind for any possible future wedding).

Subject: RE: Origins: Jenny Jenkins
From: CapriUni
Date: 03 Jan 16 - 11:00 AM

This song has been stuck in my head since I watched this video from Raymond Crooke: 2016. Jenny Jenkins -- with Axel. I admire how they're singing it: ad lib -- coming up with new lines/rhymes as they go. Done this way, it makes more sense as a courting/riddle song, than if you sing each verse with "proper" answers that have been memorized.

And, since I've had that chorus stuck in my head, I'm starting to wonder if "I'll buy me a fol-de-rol-dy, til-de-tol-dy/Seek-a-double, use-a-cause-a, roll-a-find-me" began its life as "Roll of binding," as in Seam binding (ribbon).

Thoughts? Sewing circle history, anyone?

Subject: RE: Origins: Jenny Jenkins
From: GUEST,Molly Lynn Watt
Date: 03 Oct 20 - 05:53 PM

I learned this song when I was 19 and sang on the green of Old Sturbridge Village with Bill Bonyun. I am now almost 83. It was a courting song that the village researchers found was sung in New England during the period of the Vilkage 1790 to 1840 at that time. A great coquettish rhyming game trying to stump whoever sang the Jenny or Jackie part by rare colors sometimes impossible to rhyme. I was on staff at OSV in the late fifties as was my then husband, music critic, Robert L. Gustafson.