Description

SING US ANOTHERY, DIRTY AS BUGGERY

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Track Details

Do Your Balls Hang Low?
Andre Rude & The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
Songs about testicles, large and small, abound in the bawdy song tradition where they swing low, swing high and sometimes get caught on barbed-wire fences. Several versions of this song have been collected in Australia including this one, which came from the Monash University Songbook, circa late-1950s. BVD refers to a once popular brand of men’s underwear.

The Hairs On Her Dicki-Di-Do Hung Down To Her Knees
Andre Rude & Major Bumsore with The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
The vagina, in bawdy folk song, is hardly ever referred to by its real name. Instead we get fanny, pussy, twot, (or twat) and some quite obscure names like dicki-di-do.

Pubic Hairs
Andre Rude with The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
I noted this down in the nineteen-seventies. The original Benny Davis/Harry Akst song was recorded by many artists including Eddie Cantor, Art Mooney and Brenda Lee. It was also used in the 1933 Barbara Stanwyck film Baby Face. Andre thought he was chanelling Al Jolson when singing this one.

Malcolm Jones offers an additional verse in his Penultimate Book of Bawdy Song:

‘A vagina for your breakfast, a vagina for your lunch
A vagina for your dinner
A vagina – munch, munch, munch
So take a tip from Tom
And never eat your Mom
A vagina can’t be beat.’

John Brown’s Penis
Major Bumsore & The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
No prizes for realizing how old this song is – as long as Mr. Brown’s appendage and then some.

On Top Of Old Sophie
Major Bumsore & The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
As published in Wendy Lowenstein’s 1970sstudy of bawdy Australian children’s folklore. Shocking, Shocking, Shocking. I also recall an earlier ditty about the American western mythical frontiersman, Davy Crockett, which started:
‘Born on a tabletop in Joe’s café, dirtiest brothel in the USA.’

And another I noted down some 30 year’s ago:

‘On top of Old Smoky, all covered in snow,
I saw Davy Crockett poke Marilyn Monroe,
He asked if she loved him, she answered him, ‘No’.
Bang! Bang! ‘twas the end of – Marilyn Monroe.‘

No Balls At All
Andre Rude & The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band 2.03
This song is mentioned in Brophy and Partridge The Long Trail as being sung in WW1, to the tune ‘faintly reminiscent of ‘Bonnie Dundee’. Laycock mentions it in Best Bawdy, “There is also a WW2 version about what happens when your engines cut out over Arab territory”.
I have heard it sung to several tunes. Laycock offers a final verse:

The young lady took her dear mother’s advice
And slept with the man who delivers the ice;
A seven-pound baby was born in the fall,
But the poor little bastard had no balls at all.

Arseholes Are Cheap Today
Major Bumsore & The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
This song always reminds me of the gay actor who went to his doctor about a rectal problem. When the doctor enquired what he wanted checked the thespian said, “I have a sharp pain in my entrance.” The doctor looked at him quizzically and replied, “I’m not too sure about the theatre but in my profession we call it the exit!”.

Charlotte the Harlot the Cowpuncher’s Whore
Major Bumsore & The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
Published in Monash University Bushwalking Club Songbook. Also from John Croyston, 1985. Also in Fester minus verse 5. Laycock in The Best Bawdry has this song as ‘Charlotte and the Nightwatchman’ however I have never seen or heard of it by this title. Laycock most probably re-titled the song since his printed version, like this one, brings together two songs: ‘Charlotte The Harlot’ and ‘Blinded By Shit’. Snatches & Lays offered a three-verse version as ‘The Cowpuncher’s Whore’. Brad Tate in his Bastard From the Bush has three versions as ‘Charlotte The Harlot’, with the first combining ‘Charlotte and the Nightwatchman’. Confused yet? Such are the travels of this type of song.

The Scratching Of The Agates
Major Bumsore
My old mate, the late Russel Ward, Professor of History and keen student of the bawdy tradition, collected this poem in Broken Hill (circa 1950s) where it was attributed to Stan Lowe. Agates is a derivative of uggates, a particularly old word for ram’s testes. It was popular in Australian colloquial slang but has been replaced by balls and nuts. Such is the history of slang.

Davy, Davy Knick Nacks/Balls Up.
The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
A traditional tune popular at folk festivals. Somehow-or-other it found a few words, “balls up, balls up, it’s a bloody balls up, balls up…” ad infinitum.

The Wombat
Major Bumsore
Brad Tate printed this poem in The Bastard From The Bush and pointed to its popularity with bushwalkers. I found it circulating again in 2007 on the Internet. As a keen bushwalker in my youth I always wondered about those square turds.

Barnacle Bill The Sailor
Major Bumsore & Shiela Blige with The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
A composite including some of the filthiest and funniest verses of this bawdy classic. Hoagy Carmichael had a hit record of a clean version of this song around 1930. The Australian pioneer country singer Tex Morton recorded his own parody in the 1940s (reissued ‘Australia’s Yodeling Boundary Rider’, Rouseabout Records RRH26), after Art Leonard recorded the first local cover in the early 40s for radio airplay (reissued ‘Can I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight, Mister?’ Rouseabout RRH25). The bawdy version appears to have been around a fair time, at least since Victorian times. Laycock’s version has slightly different texts. In most renditions the singer assumes a high, female voice for the woman’s verses and a deep, salty voice for Bill.

Passengers Please Refrain While At The Station
Andre Rude & His Magical Strings.
Mess Hall Songs & Rhymes of the RAAF seems to be the earliest Australian publication and version of this popular parody. Snatches & Lays published it as ‘Railway Blues’ but I have never heard it called that, despite it’s popularity. The song was no doubt inspired by the old Australian railways that carried a sign stating: ‘Gentlemen lift the seat’ ….and warnings not to use the toilet while the train was stationary – since the effluent simply went through a hole in the floor. Laycock also states (Nation Review) that the song was ‘largely written by a schoolfellow of mine back in 1951’. I am not so sure as it appears to have been in circulation from an earlier time. And as far as the music – Dvorak would be turning in his grave.

Vibrator’s Prayer
Andre Rude channeling Shiela Blige with The Heavenly Choir of St. Appalling.
This is typical of poetry that gets circulated around the internet and that is exactly where I found this one. Trivial but amusing. Andre and Shiela certainly had fun working this one out!.

Pull Back My Foreskin For Me
Major Bumsore & The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
‘My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean’ must be one of the most parodied of all popular songs. Like many bawdy songs this is clearly ridiculous and therein lies its humour. We added a shanty-type refrain to give it extra tug.

The Shearer’s Lament
Major Bumsore
I have collected numerous versions of this poem. It must have had very wide circulation. These versions from Ian Lock, Moorooka, Queensland, 1995., Trevor Madeley. Walcha, NSW, 2002, and Micheal Vial, Mooloolaba, 2005. The final line refers to the shearing shed engine.

The Wonky Road To Gundagai
Major Bumsore & Andre Rude with The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band.
The NSW country town of Gundagai attracted many poems and songs but none so popular as the song this parody was based on. We have cobbled together a couple of versions to show how parody folk song works.

The Man From Kao Magma
Major Bumsore
‘By Bedpan Splatterson’. Although usually attributed to ‘anon’ this somewhat epic poem was written by Alan Beswick and Janeen Grimes, both members of the University of Queensland Speleological Society, in 1971. Anthony Sprent wrote to me in 2000 to provide the history. ‘It was written to commemorate the ceremonial burning of Cyril Cesspit, an outside dunny on my parent’s property at Moggill near Brisbane, and the opening of a new septic tank toilet in its place. I lived there on a little cottage when I was an undergraduate student. I built the new toilet when Simon, my son was born, with the need for better sanitation. Various people mentioned in the poem were members of UQSS. The term cusec refers to cubic feet per second, a measure of volume, while Hunter Brothers was the company that removed the nightsoil in Brisbane for many years’. Kao-Magma is a medicine to halt dysentery.

The Wattle Flat Ram
Major Bumsore & The Larrikins
From Owen Judd, Wollongong, 1974 at Sofala. This song is a parody of a much older British song ‘The Yorkshire Tup’. There are also cleaner bush version as ‘The Derby Ram’ and ‘Mudgee Ram’. Once again it is a song dependent on a paused line where the obvious is omitted and replaced by the chorus.

Goodbye Blackbirds
Andre Rude & His Magical Strings.
I collected the first three verses in 1972, Sydney, and the remainder from the Penultimate Bawdy Songbook. Original ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ published in 1926 by composer Ray Henderson and lyricist Mort Dixon. Andre preferred to do this playing with himself.

Stuffed!
Major Bumsore
This was sent to me by James McPharland as a text message in 2005.

The Virgin of Nineteen
Major Bumsore & The Larrikins
As a young folklore collector in the seventies I often stayed with Mavis and Bob Michell, in Brisbane. Bob, an early collector was always very generous with his collected material and gave me a copy of his tapes, which are now deposited in the National Library of Australia. This slightly robust comic song is from the singing of Enos Newitt (born 1882) and was recorded in Bundaberg by Bob Michell and Stan Arthur in 1966. It is a tale of deception with a sharp warning in the final verse. By the end of the song it starts to sound like an old-fashioned melodrama. Recently I found a version in the Cole’s Funniest Songbook In The World (Melbourne, circa 1890s)

Condoms Are A Girl’s Best Friend
Shiela Blige & The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
Widely distributed and appears in several collections. A case of ‘don’t be silly, protect your willy’. Durex is a popular brand of condom in the United Kingdom. In Australia it was once the most popular brand of sticky tape. Go figure!

Green Leaves Upon The Green
Major Bumsore & The Larrikins
Bill Harney sang this version. I located a tape recording in the State Library of South Australia’s Oral History Collection. The original song was printed in D’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy and has been popular ever since. It is related to the common folk tales of country innocence. Laycock published the standard ‘Trooper Watering His Nag’ in The Best Bawdry. I am printing two locally collected versions for comparison.

Five Old Ladies Locked In The Lavatory
Shiela Bligh with The Celebrated Knockers & Knackers Band.
The Walker’s Songbook, Sydney, 1962. Don Laycock had seven of the old dears locked in his lavatory but went on to say he had collected twenty-one verses. In 2008, at the Australian Folklore Conference, Judy McKinty, a collector of children’s folklore, gave me a set of verses to this songs that she had taken down from female members of the Ballarat Softball Team in the 1960s, including the following verse:

‘The last one’s name was Elizabeth Draper
She went in there hoping someone would root ‘er
What she got was fifteen yards of white toilet paper
And nobody knew she was there.’

The Four Harlots
The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
The earliest printed Australian bawdy collection was published in WW2 in Papua New Guinea as Mess Songs and Rhymes of the RAAF. This was one of the songs in that collection. Slue is a swamp or backwater marsh.

Navvy On The Line
Major Bumsore & The Larrikins
From Tom Blackman Junior, in the 1950s, and collected by John Meredith and included in Folk Songs Of Australia, Sydney, 1968. Meredith collected it as a schottische tune under the same name and added “it was particularly popular with men at country dances, since most of them knew the bawdy words.’. His informant said, “The men would often request this or ‘Ivan Skivinsky Skivar’, and then dance around to the music with silly grins on their faces.”. In our rendition, which also includes a couple of ditties, we were inspired by the somewhat erratic session playing at folk festivals we had visited. All good fun.

The Barmaid With Gonorrhoea
Major Bumsore & The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
From 161 Australian Helicopter Fighter’s Song Book circa 1960s. I have another version of this parody from Tom Bernard who sent it to me from Jock McLachlan’s Royal Australian Engineer’s Song Collection, Perth, WA. n.d. circa 1960s, where the swaggie is joined by a stockman. It is a parody of one of Australia’s best known songs and a musical relative of ‘Beautiful Dreamer’.

Last Night I Pulled My Pud
Andre Rude Domingo & The Celebrated Knockers & Knacker’s Band
Mess Hall Songs & Rhymes of the RAAF. Young boys of my generation loved singing this song. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we had emerged from the more controlled war years and the “you’ll go blind” (or to hell) warnings regarding masturbation. It was a song of defiance – even if we weren’t doing it with the blatant enthusiasm and gymnastic skill of the song. pud is a colloquial reference to pudding, one of many names given to the penis. The word appears to have gone out of general use.