My dad does this game with the kids. He is sitting on the couch, and the kid is standing in front of him, holding hands with arms outstretched. He places his feet over the kid's feet, to hold them down. Then he rocks the kid back and forth singing this:
Wash the lady's dishes
Hang them on the bushes
When the bushes begin to crack
Hang them on the monkey's back
When the monkey begins to run
Shoot him with a rubber gun,
Shoot him with a rubber gun!
At the beginning of "shoot him", instead of rocking back and forth, it is more of a shaking action with the arms. The kids love it.
Since my kids like it, I do it with them also. I believe this is something that my father's parents did with him. And I'm pretty sure my dad did this with me when I was little. And it probably goes back generations prior to my father.
However, I always though the whole rhyme didn't make a lot of sense. Why hang dishes on a monkey's back? I wondered if monkey was a replacement for something else.
This if from a
book published in 1896:
Here is another version from a
book published in 1908:
Was one version from the South, and the other version from the North? Which version came first, among the two? What is a leather gun? Why would one hang dishes on a person? Is it a way to mock blacks as beasts of burden? When did the version my father quotes appear (i.e. monkey)? A rubber gun, I had always imagined as something like a rubber band.
Anyway, I think it is interesting.