The Aarne-Thompson Index to folktales lists cumulative tales of this sort
under numbers 2009-2075. These many many versions and variants are all
similar to the goat song and to The Old Woman and Her Pig (AT 2030, the one
that seems to be in question here). The House That Jack Built is the most
common English-language piece after The Old Woman and her Pig, though The
Tree in the Hole and the Hole in the Woods (etc.) is also fairly
common. 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall is built on a principle of
composition that is a bit different. It fits more with the formula tales
that Thompson places after 2075). Some of these "tales" are songs, at
least in some language traditions, some are recitations, and some are
straight prose, though rather repetitive prose. I have never encountered
The Old Woman and her Pig as anything but a prose tale, but there is no
reason why it couldn't also exist as a song or at least as a chant, as
apparently it does.
I have always been rather fond of the genre, but my kids always rebelled
when I told them.
Hope this helps.
-- Bill McCarthy
At 06:32 AM 8/6/2002 -0600, Hermina Joldersma wrote:
>Hello:
>I have a version called "The Woman and Her Pig" in the children's poetry book
>called "Tail Feathers from Mother Goose." There they cite a version
>"learned by
>George Sweetman of Wincanton in Somerset, c. 1842 (printed in 'Word-Lore',
>1926). I learned a Dutch version as a child, and I've heard a French Canadian
>one on a children's music tape. And yes, I'd seen the Passover version, too!
>Hermina
>
>Paul Stamler wrote:
>
> > Hi folks:
> >
> > I'm having a memory lapse. About ten years ago I heard the English
> > singer/buttonbox player John Kirkpatrick sing a cumulative song with verses
> > like "the ox wouldn't drink the water and the butcher wouldn't kill the ox
> > and the pig jumped over the stile" or words to that effect. Somewhere
> in the
> > cumulation is a "stick to beat the dog".
> >
> > What the heck is the song? A version of it shows up in my Passover
> haggadah,
> > of all places. Can someone give me a title, and tell me how it got
> connected
> > with Passover? (Especially since at least this version I came across has a
> > pig in it, which would make the whole thing treyf.)
> >
> > I ask because Helen Creighton collected a fragment of it from a singer in
> > Nova Scotia, and I'm trying to put that in some kind of context.
> >
> > Peace,
> > Paul
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