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  • Children's Verbal Folk Games
  • Edith Fowke

Children's verbal folk games are noteworthy for the colorful songs, chants, and rhymes that set their patterns. They include the traditional singing games and such related activities as skipping, ball bouncing, clapping, and counting out. These are the peculiar property of children and should be distinguished from nursery rhymes which originate with adults and are taught to children. There is some overlapping, but we are concerned with the rhymes that children learn from other children and pass on to younger ones in their turn. They are transmitted primarily in schoolyards and playgrounds by youngsters between the ages of five and eleven. Today some of the singing games and other chants are being taught in nursery schools and kindergartens, thus interrupting the traditional chain, but all the items recommended in this article are based on material collected directly from children. Full data for items mentioned by author and title appear in the bibliography; it is restricted to books because the literature is very extensive. The records listed present children's games as sung by children except for The Singing Streets, a fascinating exchange of childhood memories from Scotland and Ireland.

Two comprehensive survey books which contain examples of many different kinds of children's rhymes are the Opies' The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren for England and the Knapps' One Potato, Two Potato for the United States. A more limited but very informative little book is Rutherford's All the Way to Pennywell which describes the major writing about children's rhymes, summarizes the theories of their origin, function, and form, and provides a fairly extensive bibliography. Also of interest for their commentary as well as their rhymes are such other British collections as Holbrook's Children's Games, Daiken's Children's Games Throughout the Year, and Norman Douglas's London Street Games.

Four fairly extensive national collections are Brady's All In! All In! for Ireland, Fowke's Sally Go Round the Sun for Canada, Turner's Cinderella Dressed in Yella for Australia, and Sutton-Smith's Games of New Zealand Children. The first three classify [End Page 16] the rhymes but give little discussion beyond descriptions of the games; Sutton-Smith provides more extensive commentary.

In earlier times singing games were extremely popular as shown by the extensive nineteenth-century collections of Lady Gomme in the British Isles and W. E. Newell in the United States. In more recent times most of the formally patterned games seem to have lost their popularity, but many of the songs and chants associated with them have been adapted to new uses and now accompany skipping or ball bouncing.

Skipping is probably the most widespread of all children's game activities today. Most books of children's lore include a substantial section on skipping rhymes, and there are numerous articles and a few books devoted entirely to this genre: for example, Evans' Jump Rope Rhymes and Worstell's Jump Rope Jingles. Incidentally, "jump-rope" rhymes is the usual term in the United States; in Britain and Canada they are "skipping" rhymes. Roger Abrahams has surveyed the enormous literature on this activity in his Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary, which gives 619 rhymes and an eight-page bibliography, and Robert Cosbey provides a good discussion of the patterns and subject matter.

Counting out is an ancient and universal rite. Henry Bolton compiled rhymes from various countries in the nineteenth century. Walter Gregor collected some early Scottish forms, and Carl Withers recorded twentieth-century items in the United States. Counting-Out Rhymes: A Dictionary compiled by Abrahams and Rankin gives 582 patterns and ten pages of bibliographical items.

Ball-bouncing rhymes are often interchangeable with skipping rhymes, although certain chants seem more associated with one or the other. I know of no books specifically on this form, but most collections of children's game lore include a section on ball bouncing, some describing the patterns that go with the texts.

It is perhaps stretching the term a bit to include clapping songs under folk games, but the various rhythmic patterns that accompany certain chants require skill and coordination, qualities that distinguish many games. Clapping songs have...

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