28 Children’s
Folklore
until the 1950s “the art of hand-clapping did not exactly die out; but it came a
poor third to ball-bouncing and skipping amongst the games of agility. It was
not till the wave of sparkling and spirited chants came over from America that it
would enjoy a revival” (443). Since the 1960s, handclaps have delighted children
in many parts of the world. Video clips of handclapping games on YouTube in
2007 came from Australia,
Guatemala, Nepal, Kenya, Japan, and the United
Kingdom, among other countries.
In the 1960s, African American girls’ handclapping games attracted scholars’
attention. The film
Pizza Pizza Daddy-O
by Bess Lomax Hawes shows African
American girls doing handclaps on a Los Angeles playground in 1967. Kyra D.
Gaunt’s in-depth study
Th
e Games Black Girls Play
(2006) presents girls’ clapping
games as fluid combinations of sound, sense, and motion.
Gaunt states, “The
kinetic orality of African American musical aesthetics that girls learn to inhabit
through these games points to a lived phenomenology of a gendered blackness”
(57). Among the important points that Gaunt makes are relationships between
clapping games and hip-hop music. The game Down Down Baby, for example,
has a connection to the songs “Country Grammar” by the hip-hop singer Nelly
(2000) and “Shimmy Shimmy Ko Ko Pop” by Little Anthony and the Imperials
(1956), as well as a movement in the song “Ballin’ the Jack” (1913). These con-
nections, Gaunt suggests, make it possible “to consider that women and girls are
playing a vital role in the production of popular taste” (101– 2).
Jump-Rope Rhymes
Jumping or skipping rope has entertained children since the Middle Ages.
Norman
Douglas notes in
London Street Games
that boys used to participate in
jumping rope before it became a game for girls. Douglas mentions the popu-
larity of rhymes for choosing a sweetheart’s name, such as “Black-currant—red
currant—raspberry tart: tell me the name of your sweetheart” (27). The jumper re-
cites letters of the alphabet; if she misses on “D,” that will be the initial of her sweet-
heart’s first name. This divinatory function of jump-rope rhymes has continued into
the twenty-first century, although the rhymes have changed to some extent.
Roger Abrahams’s
Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary
(1969) offers an excel-
lent list of jump-rope rhymes with bibliographic citations. His study and others
focus more on the rhymes than the actions that accompany them, but recent
approaches have changed. In her 1995 essay “Double Dutch and Double Cam-
eras,” Ann Richman Beresin observes, “the privileging of game texts by collectors
of children’s folklore has been directly related to the available methodologies for
folk-game study” (75). Her own analysis of working-class girls’
Double Dutch
(two-rope) performances involved the use of two video cameras: one in a second-
floor window and another down in the schoolyard where the children played.
De
fi
nitions and Classi
fi
cations 29
This approach effectively captures the movements and context of jump rope, as
well as verbal interaction.
Autograph Rhymes
Children began to write verses in each others’ autograph albums in the late
1800s. Closely related to verses on Valentine’s Day and other seasonal cards, early
autograph rhymes expressed the importance of friendship. In his study of nine-
teenth-century autograph books in New York, W. K.
McNeil notes the popular-
ity of rhymes about friendship and memory; he also notes the popularity of letter
codes such as “YYUR, YYUB, ICUR YY4me” [Too wise you are, too wise you be,
I see you are too wise for me].
Simon J. Bronner’s
American Children’s Folklore
offers a representative selec-
tion of twentieth-century children’s autograph rhymes, including many funny
and critical verses (83 –95). Some rhymes comment
humorously on courtship,
Girl jumps rope in New York City in the late 1970s.
Photograph by Martha Cooper.
30 Children’s
Folklore
marriage, and children, all of which represent the mysterious future. Expecta-
tions of continuing friendship emerge in rhymes such as “When you get older
and have twins, call on me for safety pins.”
Although autograph albums have become less common than they used to be,
students still write in each other’s yearbooks and sign T-shirts, casts on broken
limbs, and other objects. Elementary-school children enjoy reading books like
Joanna Cole’s
Yours Till Banana Splits: 201 Autograph Rhymes
(1995), which help
to keep the old rhyming traditions alive.
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