Yes, or the time I locked my brother in the trunk of the car.

Oh wait.... maybe that's too weird.

I don't think that's too uncommon a lullabye -- I'm pretty sure I remember hearing it from my parents and I have sung snatches of it to my dotter, and think I have heard it sung to other people's children.

Emerson-that's not weird. I think I did that. At least, there was a time in my life where I was capable of it.

My brother, not yours.

what's weird about that?

Surely evern family has goofy songs they sing to children at bedtime. That one would be a standard, I'd think.

OTOH, the point about "things that seem normal you suddenly realize are strange" is a pretty much a commonplace; your example would not win one round of "can you top this?" I'd think.

Whenever my family took a road trip, the first thing we did when we hit traffic-free highway was sing "Paint Your Wagon" at the absolute top of our lungs. At least, my dad and my brothers and I—Mom wanted no part of this.

Whenever my family took a road trip, the first thing we did when we hit traffic-free highway was sing "Paint Your Wagon" at the absolute top of our lungs. At least, my dad and my brothers and I—Mom wanted no part of this.

I thought it was kind of an odd song to sing as a lullaby as it seems to question paternity.

your example would not win one round of "can you top this?" I'd think

Oh, that's so true. It's just what made me think of it. It doesn't even win round one just in my family's folklore. The one that leaves non-family-members scratching their heads most frequently in our house is the Legend of Little Billy. Growing up, whenever we would do something X, which was ill-advised, the "joke" was that we used to have an older brother Billy who died doing X and is buried in the backyard. Like "you'd better eat all of your vegetables or you'll catch scurvy and die like Billy and we'll have to bury you in the backyard". Or "Billy never picked up his toys either and one day he tripped over them, fell and broke his neck and died, and we had to bury him in the backyard."

My (real) little brother (who understood it was a joke) told a "Billy story" to his teacher in second grade and that was a fun trip my parents got to take to the school counselor's office.

(And after writing 8, let me remind you that my parents are both psychologists.)

The laughter produced by the 8 and 9 was sorely needed at this point in my day. Thanks, Becks.

I guess Little Billy never lived to be old enough to blog.

Your parents sound weirdly sane for psychologists, Becks. Are you sure they're not really murderers for hire who just say they're psychologists?

12 - I don't know, Tim. Would that deepen your love for my mother even more?

I know a man who sang his kids to sleep with "Miss Otis Regrets."

Would that deepen your love for my mother even more?

"It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black."

so was it the Joe Jackson version, or an earlier one? (Maybe Cab Calloway?)

Just read Geraldine Brooks' "March" last night--her reimagining of the father's backstory in Little Women.

Connects to your post in that I read LW many times without wondering "so if they are so close to the cream of Concord society, and have such a big old house, why *are* they flat broke?"

11: Of course he lived to be old enough to blog, ogged. An internet stalker hunted him down and killed him and they had to bury him in the back yard.

your example would not win one round of "can you top this?" I'd think.

Now if her postman had been the one singing that . . .

'Smasher, how old were you when you first saw that movie? I remember it being pretty racy, with lots of whoring and drinking. Or did you just know the song? It's probably one of the least gay showtunes, I suppose.

Also, for anyone who's never seen the movie, it features Clint Eastwood singing a song about talking to trees. Memorable, although not necessarily in a good way. Lee Marvin? Not such a good set of pipes either. And apparently most of the extra townsfolk in it were hippies from nearby Oregon communes.

And lastly, some questions:

Has anyone ever seen a painted Connestoga wagon?

Why do they call the wind "Mariah"?

Was there a Simpson's episode where Homer watches it, or am I misremembering?

For people still looking for Halloween costumes, one of my coworkers suggested an amusing group costume: go as "The Simpsons". Not Marge, Homer, etc. but Jessica, OJ, etc.

I think everyone goes throught the stage when they realise that their family is deeply weird compared with everyone else's, and then later on the stage when they realise that everyone thinks this about their families. At which point you either have to concede that your family isn't so weird after all, or insist everyone else may be wrong about their families, but yours really is weird.

The second option is of course the correct one.

There are too many songs with "Baby" in them that are a little weird when sung from parent to child. On the other hand, "Stay Up Late" by the Talking Heads is a favorite.

My kids rather liked Tom Lehrer's "The MLF Lullaby" (It starts out "Sleep, baby, sleep". You try thinking of a lullaby at three in the morning) but I stopped singing it when they got old enough to ask what the Wehrmacht was.

You too? The MLF Lullaby does kind of come naturally.

I know someone who claimed to use "Here Comes Your Man" as a lullaby, replacing "Man" with "Mom".

so was it the Joe Jackson version, or an earlier one? (Maybe Cab Calloway?)

Almost certainly the latter -- he was in his late 50s when I worked for him a few years ago, and I never heard him listen to music younger than he was.

When I was just a wee babe in the crib, I used to distract myself between feedings by singing "I'm
Waiting for My Mom".

And by injecting heroin.

My kids will yell at me when I sing songs with made up lyrics.

The MLF Lullaby

You spelled MILF wrong.

Was there a Simpson's episode where Homer watches it, or am I misremembering?

No, this happens. I assumed that what he watches isn't an accurate representation of the movie, but I've never seen it, so who knows.

"Gonna use an oil-based paint, because the wood is pine!"
"Ponderosa pine!"

The MILF Lullaby

That'd be this one?

I have been singing my kids to sleep with "In the Pines" I use lyrics that are a mix of the Leadbelly/Nirvanna version and the Bill Monroe/Dolly Parton version, and I sing it like the Tennessee Ernie Ford version (low and slow, very soporific, especially for babies resting their heads on your chest.)

The way I mash the words together, the story clearly turns out to be about a woman who is sleeping in the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines, and shivering the whole night through, because she murdered her abusive husband.

When Caroline and Joey are Becks age, will they count this as a “my family is just a little weird” thing?

Whenever I used to complain to Dad that Mom was being mean/abusive to me (when I was 3 or 4), my dad would reply, "Fine, AWB. We'll just get a new Mom for you." At the time, I thought it was a joke, but, considering how fucked-up my mom was, and how miserable he was, it's hard to see it as a joke now.

I also distinctly remember Mom lending me Thomas Harris's Red Dragon (about a deeply disturbed guy who murders whole families and videos himself fucking their dead bodies so he can jerk off to them later) when I was twelve.

God, families are weird.

One of the first songs I ever sang to my daughter, while we were still in the orphanage and I was holding her for the first time, dancing ecstatically around the orphanage office, the first thing that came to mind:

When you're a jet you're a jet all the way
From your first cigarrette to your last dying day
When you're a jet it's a wonderful thing
Little boy you're a man, little man you're a girl

(And my favorite lullabye to sing to her in the first year she was with us, was "Freight Train" by Libby Cotten.)

Becks, I would think that our parents are from the same era as my mom used to sing that around the house. What really threw me was her fav. song with the lyrics:

Marsi dotes and dosi dotes and lil lamsi divi

I was in my twenties when I finially learned the real lyrics.

Lullabies ... yeah my mom sang me Freight Train. She also did You Are my Sunshine and Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child . They all seemed sad to me, but looking back the last one was weird too. But that is how she felt.

I don't have funny-family stories. My family was just too fucked up to be funny.

I always felt a little self-conscious about singing "Freight Train" because sleep and death get mixed up so closely in it -- "When I'm dead and in my grave,/ No more good times here will I crave./ Lay a stone at my head and feet,/ Tell my sweet child I'm gone to sleep." (Well that is to say I felt self-conscious outside the moment when reflecting on it; I submit that it's pretty well impossible to feel self-conscious while singing that song which is one of the ones that I would point to as archetypally bluesy.)

(Other archetypally bluesy songs: "Big Leg Woman Get My Pay" by Blind Boy Fuller, "Richland Woman Blues" by Mississippi John Hurt.)

Surely there's a "Lil' Baby Won't Stop Caterwaulin' Blues", or somesuch, out there, no?

For example:

My baby won't stop cryin'
Lord I don't know what to do
I said that baby won't stop cryin'
Lord and I don't know what to do
Seems I just done changed his diaper
But once again it's full of poo

My mom used to sing "Alouette" to me when I was little. The lyrics, about biting the heads of birds, came to resonate in our relationship later.

of s/b off

Lonesome Charlie Bonner sings the Cryin' Baby Blues, but I have never listened to it.

Is that what "je te plumerai le tete" means? I never thought about it.

I believe it actually means "pluck," but I'm no French-speaker.

Alouette is seriously weird. I am going to pluck your back, I am going to pluck your back. Your back! Your back. Lark! Lark. Oh oh oh oh.

It may indeed mean "pluck," but I guess I've always imagined one must do so with the teeth.

A lexicon I just looked in thought plumer means pluck or "rip off", so te plumerai le tete would be "rip off your head", non?

The grammar works out a little funny to English speakers, because of how French doesn't do possessives with body parts. So it's lit. "I will pluck you the head/back/whatever."

I think.

(sorry about the incorrect gender and the missing hat -- perhaps this will serve as atonement.

Okay, so it's about plucking a lark's feathers in preparation for cooking it, which makes the lyrics much less mystifying. Thanks, National Institutes of Health (and CÆ)!

49: Non, monsieur. It means to pluck, as you would do in preparation for cooking. "Alouette" means "lark," which I believe qualifies as a game bird in France.

So, anyway, I think it's a little ambigious even in French, in the same way that "I will pluck your head, yo, Larkie," is in English -- pluck the head off, or pluck the feathers from the head? Oh oh oh oh.

(For example, what about "je te plumerai les yeux"? No feathers on the eyes.)

Pwned and plucked.

Well, who the hell knows the lyrics to kids lullabyes? And the ones that you do know are all stupid.

I sang most of the Cole Porter songbook to PK when he was a baby. It's actually kinda funny how many of those love songs work well as lullabyes. Like "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," or "Why Can't You Behave?"

56: Maybe the eyes are plucked out, but otherwise it's feathers? Or the feathers around the eyes?

56: Plucking out the eyes. Admittedly, some of the lyrics go a little overboard, and I would consult some other text if you're actually cooking lark.

Cooking a lark seems like more trouble than it's worth.

Uh, that is to say, if I were.

But ok -- let's assume the song actually deals with plucking a lark in preparation for cooking -- in that case what is "je te plumerai le nez" doing in there? Larks haven't got any noses, they have beaks; and can you pluck a beak? Hm actually maybe you can -- I've never prepared a game bird for cooking, I would have thought you had to cut the beak off; but maybe it is something you pluck off. Nemmine.

58: Go on and blow, Gabriel, blow.

Well, you'd just cut off its head with a knife. Not so much fun for kids.

You would have to remove the beak in some manner, and I suppose plucking's as good as any.

The cooking explanation seems to have cleared up less confusion than I originally thought.

It's not like a stinger, though. It's all woven into the head and stuff.

Also: Up until this evening when you guys drove me to look the lyrics up on line, I have always thought the first line of the verse to be something like "Alouette, j'enté Alouette" -- don't speak or understand French but I thought the middle word was "je" plus another word ending in an ay sound. Similar misunderstanding: the beginning of Psalm 66 is "Jubiláte Deo, omnis terra:/ servite Dómino in lætítia." But when I heard it growing up and knowing nothing of Latin, I thought the end of the second line was something like "in les titzia".

58: Cole Porter, absolutely, and loads of the rest of the Great American Songbook. I used to sing "Let's Fall in Love" (or whatever the title is of the song that begins "Birds do it, bees do it"), "It Might As Well be Spring," "They Say It's Spring" and this Nina Simone song, "The Other Woman," which is kind of bleak but which has a perfect slow melody for a lullaby.

69 (Yay!) is I.

I sang the Eagles' "Peaceful Easy Feeling" to my kids when they were infants. Now I sing "Get a Job" to them.

I'm not sure if pointing out that they're 8 and 5 makes this fact more funny or less so.

Definitely more.

I thought it was the tongue of the lark one was after.

I sang 'I'm an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande' to my kids, but when they'd put up their hands, like DR, I'd sing 'STOP, in the name of love . . .'

Oh, another bizarre mom-memory. She used to sing that Donovan song that goes "Yellow is the color of my true love's hair / in the morning / when we rise / in the morning / when we rise / That's the time (that's the time!) / That's the time (that's the time!) / I love the best."

When I hit puberty, I realized he means that's the time during which he "loves" the best.

(Psalm 66 would make a really nice lullabye. Hard to sing in four voices; but I think just the tenor part by itself would be very soothing. Make a Joyful Sound.)

It's a list of body parts, people, so that little children can learn the names of parts of their bodies, not a literal description of plucking lunch. [Ortolans are much more gruesome to prepare; one drowns them in brandy.]

I used to sing the folk song Pigeon House to the Offspring when he was a baby, but when he got old enough to talk, he demanded Mister Mister's Kyrie or the folk song Gaudete.

Now, of course, it's all R&B and trance and dear Ghod, Paris Hilton. I shudder to think what he might sing to his children.

"Hey little baby, shut your trap
Daddy's gonna sing you a beddy-bye rap
And if you cry or wet your bed
Daddy's gonna knock you upside your head"

Hm -- I assumed that file was going to be the motet. But not -- it is very pleasant but is not the song I thought would be good as a lullaby.

Of course the purpose of the song is just to be a list of body parts, but it's still a remarkably peculiar way to structure it. The closest anglophone equivalent is "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes," which contains no larks or plucking at all, and which I just realized the other day has the same tune as "There is a tavern in the town," which, to return to the original topic of the thread, my dad used to sing when I was little.

Not so weird: the first song I learned for Thing 1 and Thing 2 was a Brazilian lullaby, Paurillo Barroso's "Para Niñar," that I memorized from this album. Sweet, sweet. The 30-second clip at the link is a good section.

There was a King Crimson reference to be made, and someone made it before w-lfs-n did. Further, people are typically awake in w-lfs-n's normal time zone at that time. I deduce that w-lfs-n is either dead, kidnapped, or in some other way forcibly incommunicado. Further, anyone purporting to be Ben w-lfs-n who claims otherwise should not be believed, as this very comment may provoke them to try to cover up their heinous misdeeds. And they may have spent months, nay years, learning to emulate his style of commenting. Finally, of course, if they are in fact holding him hostage, commenting from his IP address is the easiet thing in the world for them.

I was also going through some Cole Porter tunes one night and started in on "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," but that was definitely a little too weird.

Yeah, well, that song is just icky in every way. "Daddy"? Ewwww.

81: I go to class occasionally, you know. Where's the reference? I haven't read the whole thread.

Commenting so quckly after 81 just increases my suspicions. And it's not much of an inspiration for a reference, just someone going from the very mention of body part's of larks to "lark's tongue in aspic." Which the real Ben w-lfs-n would know.

83: "If I invite some boy, some night, to dine on my fine finnan haddie"? You know he had to be mightily pleased with himself after writing that line.

Evidently not one involving larks' tongues in aspic.

85: I said I hadn't read the thread.

But showed up as soon as someone mentioned the surprising evidence of your absence, faux-ben.

I was tipped off as to the proceedings by a third-party informant.

86: Oh, sure. And as a gay song, it's all campy and hilarious. But if you think of it as trying to pass for straight, you can tell that the entire point was to make straight women refuse to fuck men, like, ever. Leaving more of 'em for Cole, obviously.

Damn you, Cole Porter!

Not so fast, Teo. He approved of a woman sleeping around for gifts. Could work for you.

He approved of a woman sleeping around for gifts

...from "wealthy older men."

Actually, I always thought the point of that was more like, it's none of your business who I fuck or why. It's one of my favorite of his songs.

Well, that too, but why not profit from it? Come to think of it, Teo, have you ever seen Midnight Cowboy? Just a thought.

ATM it's everyone's business who B fucks and why.

I have not seen Midnight Cowboy.

97: Oh, I still have a few secrets.

98: Whether or not you get any career/relationship advice from it, you absolutely must see Midnight Cowboy.

Yeah, there are a lot of movies I haven't seen but should. I don't see many movies.

That's whom I fuck or B fucks, people.

Use/mention distinctions are for the weak.

I see that teaching the two-year-old to observe that cats are fickle creatures doesn't even rate.

"How does the cat go?"
"Meow."
"And what do we know about cats?"
"Fick'l Keechers."

Obviously being weird is another one of those parental things that it takes time to get good at.

So if any of you New Yorkers were walking on 5th Avenue this morning and passed a guy singing "Alouette" and grinning foolishly, well, I wish you would have stopped to say hello.

A question for the w-lfs-ns among us: If you wished to write the phrase the emperor's new clothing but to scare-quote "emperor", what would be the proper punctuation: the "emperor"'s new clothing, or the "emperor's" new clothing?

75 - I looooove Colours by Donovan!

Donovan is fun. I had never made the connection that AWB is talking about vis-a-vig "Colours". My fave is "Season of the Witch". (In 1984 or 5, my friends and I drove to SF to attend a Donovan comeback tour (or something like that) -- it was very weird, he was playing in a hotel lounge and we were the only young people there.)

Donovan's career was fucked in the first place when some industry jerk decided to market him as the British Dylan. This was obviously greeted with such contempt by all and sundry that the poor guy was never judged on his own merits, and it's a tribute to his abilities that he managed to sell records for two or three years.

Clownae, was he actually any good any more?

No, not really any good -- just weird. He sang songs off his albums which I loved listening to on record -- but the lovely quality present in the recordings was not present. I am having trouble naming the quality -- my first thought was "naivete" or "ingenuity" but that is not quite what I'm looking for. "Youth" maybe?

BTW OFE, do you know where the "Don't Look Back" appearance of Donovan fits in with his recording career? Had he already at that point been dubbed "the British Dylan"? -- was that appearance part of the marketing effort?

It was indeed. Even at the time I thought it was cruel and unusual punishment.

Donovan recently put out a memoir. I haven't read it.

My mother was obsessed with Donovan when I was a kid, so for one of her birthdays, I gathered up quite a bit of cash to buy her the "Troubadour" box set. She greedily ripped it open in the next room to look at the nude photos. Then we listened to "Atlantis" like a thousand times. I can still do the whole speech by heart, in a Scottish accent.

Donovan is supposed to collaborate with Devendra Banhart at some point.

106: "vis-a-vis" + "WYSIWYG" = "vis-a-vig"?

113: Only vit a Tscherman accent, I seenk.

What you seenk is what you get.

Or:
Seenk, and you shall find
Conk, and the door shall be opened
Bask, and you shall receive
And the love come tumblin' down.

70: Teo - Not for the French. One has to train children in their early years to find feather-plucking a fun sort of thing, so that they can pluck ortolans in 30 seconds. [I dimly remember that this was a fur-trapper's camp song, which makes it less haute cuisine and more lark-and-beans, but it's all cooking...]

Besides, children are grim little creatures. It always upset my mother that I dispassionately watched the cook slaughter chickens and lambs; she seemed to feel that I wouldn't want to eat dinner if I'd realised the food we ate came from the animals I'd played with. [Well, not so much chickens, who are not a lot of fun, but fluffy lambs are good for hugging,] It only taught me to appreciate that one should eat what one kills, lest a former pet go to waste. Which is probably why I cannot get on board with the "save our horses from being eaten by Belgians" campaign that's going on in CA - If one can eat Bambi and Thumper and Wilbur and Chicken Little, it seems silly to exempt Flicka from becoming cheval bourginogne.

Davey Jones put out a memoir, too.

It's called: "They Made a Monkee out of Me".

It's pretty, good, too--he gave me a copy, so I had to read it.

A question for the w-lfs-ns among us: If you wished to write the phrase the emperor's new clothing but to scare-quote "emperor", what would be the proper punctuation: the "emperor"'s new clothing, or the "emperor's" new clothing?

I would go with the “emperor”'s new clothes, I think. But you might have greater clarity with the so-called emperor's new clothes or the like, though that would involve deviation from the form.

My mother was obsessed with Donovan when I was a kid.

We sympathize wholeheartedly and are willing to try to help, but you're still responsible for your own acts. It's strictly toughlove around here.