beetiger | Silly songs

Silly songs

More on the details of old family movies later, but for now, a childhood song question:

There's a tune which I think sometimes gets called "Arabian Song", the one that usually gets used in cartoons to denote snake charming, with the rhythm "NaNa Naa Naa Naa, NaNa NaNa NaNa Naa". The lyrics I learned for it as a kid started "All the girls in France..." and were rather bizarre.

If you know what I'm talking about, and you have lyrics you sang as a kid, please post them, together with where you grew up. I get the impression that this is one that has had a lot of regional variation, and I am curious.

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As learned in the Hudson Valley:

There's a place in France
where the naked ladies dance
and a hole in the wall
where the ??? see it all.

Sorry, can't remember all of that last line.

The Queensbury, NY variant (a bit north of the Hudson Valley) is similar:

There's a place in France
where the naked ladies dance
and a hole in the wall
where the men can see it all
but the ? don't care
'cause they're wearing underwear

(The ? is a one-syllable beat, and I think the word is "men," but it may be "girls," (which would make more sense but is not the clearer memory))

More or less the same version for me, growing up in Northern Virginia.

Ditto, from NW Ohio.

Same here, and Northern Virginia also.

Last two lines as I recall were

But the men don't care
'Cause the girls wear underwear.

That's also what I learned in central New Jersey. Actually, a slight variant:

There's a place in France
where the naked ladies dance.
There's a hole in the wall
Where the men can see it all.

There's a land called France
Where they don't wear underpants.

or else Where the ladies wear no pants.

I don't remember the second couplet as well. It varied more, I think.

Greater Boston area, 1970s.

All the girls in France

Do the hula-hula dance

And the way they shake

They could kill a poison snake.

When the snake is dead

They put flowers in its head.

When the flowers die

It is 1945.

born 1961, Northern NJ -- but right next to New York City, right by the Lincoln Tunnel. Call it 1966 through 1974 was my grade school years.

Okay, I think you're my closest peer in age/location so far...and by far the closest in lyrics. The weird thing is , of course, that I'm pretty sure I learned this song from my father, not my peers, which would put in more into the early 50s in Long Island.

The way I learned it:

All the girls in France
Do the hula-hula dance
And the way they shake
Is enough to kill a snake
When the snake is dead
They put flowers in their head
When the flowers die
They put diamonds in their eye
When the diamonds break
It's the year of '68.

Strangely, the lyric was for the year after I was born. A future date in my father's version, or something made up for me when I was one which stuck with the family through the years?

I only know the first 4 lines, and I'm Brooklyn, NY, born in 1969.

Nothing about the dead snake, and I also heard the underwear one and the hole in the wall one.

Yours is closest to the way I remember it, from about 1968 in Brooklyn. I never heard the naked-lady version :)

Well Fred Schiender of the B-52's had a song called "Monster" where the lyrics went

Oh They Never Wear Pants
In the other side of France
But they always wear Fleece
To Protect them from the Beasts

(deleted comment)

Great Article.

I grew up in the East Bay Area of northern California, and our version is nearly identical to some others already posted here:

There's a place in France
Where the Naked Ladies dance
There's a hole in the wall
Where the men see it all
But the men don't care
'Cause they have no underwear

The dim recesses of memory impress upon me that it was the men who had no underwear, although I never understood why they didn't care.

I find it amusing that the author of the article states the children's version of the Arabian Song is "conservative". I guess he doesn't know about the Naked Ladies version.

I think he means "conservative" as it relates to "conservation"; that is to say, that children's songs seem to stick around generation after generation, long after the tunes have faded from popular music generally.

Nakedness, groos out, and vaguely dirty words have always been popular in the grade-school folk tradition. :)

I actually have that article too...I was saving it to post for after I got more responses from people. That's got stuff that's closer to the version I learned in it. :)

We had a variant on the standard:

There's a place in France
Do the hootchie-kootchie dance
There's a hole in the wall
Where the men can see it all.

We also had this odd one:

I'm a Persian cat.
I'm a lovely persian cat.
My face is like macaroni,
My tail is long and bony.

This was up in Poughkeepsie.

Woops! First line should be "All the girls in France"

There's a place in France
Where the nekkid ladies dance
And the dance they do
Costs a dollar-ninety-two.

Grew up in central Utah. And I do mean central. Not northern. Fillmore. Smack in the middle of the state.

Providence, RI: public elementary schools.

There's a place in France
Where the ladies where no pants
If you find them there
You can smell their underwear

I think there was another rhyming couplet after that, but I can't remember it. I do remember most of the "Yay! No more school!" songs that we used to sing, because I sing them every early summer. Want the lyrics to those?

I meant, Where the ladies wear no pants.

And I was born in '75, so this is circa early 80's.

There's a place in France where the naked ladies dance.
There's a hole in the wall where you can see it all.

- Georgia variant

Both my partner and I (both L.A. children, with me in school in the mid-late 60s and him about 5 years after) recall a song that begins:

There's a place in France
Where the ladies where no pants

Neither of us can remember what comes after that, although we're pretty sure that there's something later about a dance and about someone having no underpants. The couplet "and the dance they do/costs a dollar ninety-two" also rang a strong bell for me.

Children's culture like this fascinates me, and I wish I remembered it better. I have little fragments like this of hand-clapping and jump-roping songs too.

Have you seen this book ?

I don't own it, but I flipped through it a while back, it was fun.

Oooh! Fun!

That's a fun book! My library has it, and I looked at it while it was being cataloged.

Growing up in the 70's in a Western suburb of Chicago, I heard it as
There's a place in France
Where the naked ladies dance.
There's a hole in the wall
Where the men can see it all.
I have a vague feeling that there should be more to it, but none of the extra couplets people have mentioned sound familiar.

There was a spin-off in the 90's when the New Kids On The Block were popular, which began

There's a place in France
Where the New Kids wet their pants

but I don't remember the rest, if there was any. (:

(:,
Pace

In mid-50s: The girls in France/Do the hootchie kootchie dance/ and the dance they do/ (here is what I can't remember, and why I googled the first two lines, and how I found this string!) but it ends in "you." The one post about "costs a dollar ninety-two" rhymes well with my memory of "the dance they do." I wish I could remember that last line?

Wow, when I went searching for this song, I never believed I would find so many variations. So let me add what I recall from the Cincinnati version...
All the girls in France do the Hoochie-Coochie dance
And the dance they do is enough to kill a mule
And the mule they kill is enough to take a pill
And the pill they take is enough to (something) a snake
(more stuff I can't remember, then it makes it way to...)
...fell behind the fridgerator, there lay a piece of glass
Miss Lucy fell upon it and broke her assssk me no more questions, I'll tell you no more lies
Miss Lucy told me all of this the day before she died.

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Silly songs

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snakes

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girls in france

All the girls in France