Kitchee Kitchee Ki-Me-O

Back in the late 1950s, when I was 5 or 6 years old, Mama walked with my two brothers and me down to the spring in the hollow behind our house. We were going to fetch some water for the house as a summer storm a couple of days earlier had knocked the power out and consequently our pump wasn’t running. Mama also had a bar of soap and a rag so that we all could wash up. That was the first time I recall having to bathe down there, but wasn’t the only time. We again depended on the clear, cold water from that spring during the two weeks we were without electricity in the aftermath of Hurricane Camille in ’69. As we were taking our turns with the wash rag, Mama began to sing the strangest and most delightful tune my young ears had ever heard:

There was an old frog who lived in the spring
He had such a cold he could not sing
Soooo, he sang a song
Kitchee kitchee ki-mo
Kee-mo ki-mo
Humpty dumpty alley-o
Ring sing pot doodle
Loopy cat
Billy Billy bootjack
Sing a song
Kitchee kitchee ki-me-o

She sang the first three lines at a moderate to slow pace while singing the remaining nonsense words much faster. As delicious as they were, trying to catch all those crazy words made my head spin. We asked her to sing it multiple times so that we could learn the pattern and sequence of those nonsense words. After the third or fourth time, she said, “Well, that’s enough of that!” I kept trying to sing it all the way back up to the house.

This childhood memory was triggered a few days ago while I was watching Sergeant York, the old film starring Gary Cooper, for the umpteenth time. There’s a brief scene in the opening few minutes of this movie in which a rural Tennessee farmer is riding into town on his mule while singing an old folk song. For some reason, upon this viewing I happened to think of Mama’s little ditty and our bath al fresco down at the spring, The song in the movie, like Mama’s, is also filled with nonsense words, and though the two have completely different tunes and lyrics, they share some similarities in style and substance.

With apologies to Warner Bros., here's a brief audio clip of the song from the movie:

Checking this movie’s credits at imdb.com, I see that the song is called “Froggy Went a-Courtin.” However, if Mama’s little ditty had a name, I never knew it. As kids, my siblings and I called it variously “Kitchy Kitchy Ki-me-o” or “Kee-mo Ki-mo” or simply the frog song. I have to confess that I tried my best to recollect all the nonsense words in the lyrics before I gave up and called my sister Linda to see what she remembered. She reminded me that Mama wrote about this song and documented the lyrics in her memoir. Turns out that I’d remembered only about half of it with any clarity, though the word clarity seems a bit oxymoronic in this context.

Mama wrote that her father (my grandfather, Papa Bond) would often sing it to her and her siblings. I imagine it delighted her as a child as much as she delighted in singing it to her children. Mama would often break out in song while we were hoeing or picking and hulling peas and butterbeans or while shucking corn or picking up pecans or doing the any of the many other mindless tasks that were required around the house and farm. Her favorite tunes were some of the old church hymns, but she would also sing a number of folk tunes like “Bill Bailey,” “Sixteen Tons,” and “Tom Dooley.” At those times we would often ask her to sing the “Kitchy Kitchy Ki-me-o” song.

Wanting to know more about this old song, I turned to Google. Here are a few of the interesting things I’ve discovered. It seems that the song—and that of countless variations—stems from an old British nursery rhyme song called “A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go” which became “Froggie Went A-Courting” in the US. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, the progenitor song can be traced through at least four and a half centuries, back to around the year 1550, with the earliest extant text from 1611. By the late 1700s the song, in several variations, was both familiar as a nursery song and was being performed on stage on both sides of the Atlantic. The Traditional Tune Archive website asserts that the ‘kemo kimo’ nonsense rhyming phrase, also originating in England, was incorporated into “Froggie Went a-Courtin'“ family of songs early on.

Musicologists collecting Appalachian folk songs in the early 20th century found as many as forty versions with twenty-two variants. These include King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O which was recorded in 1928 by Chubby Parker and released on Columbia Record’s “Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 1.”

Here is a snippet of its lyrics:

Frog went a courtin' and he did ride
King Kong kitchie kitchie ki-me-o
With a sword and a pistol by his side
King Kong kitchie kitchie ki-me-o
Ki-mo-ke-mo ki-mo-ke
Way down yonder in a hollow tree
An owl and a bat and a bumblebee
King Kong kitchie kitchie ki-me-o

The popularity and wide oral circulation of songs such as these led to a mystifying array of nonsense lyrics, and the many dozens of distinct versions have little in common but the fact of their comic rhyming verses. The song from Sergeant York illustrates that point. Likewise, Nat King Cole recorded a version of “Kemo Kimo” called "The Magic Song" in 1947 that can be included in this category.

Nat’s song contains the following snippet in the chorus, but it does not include the Kitchee kitchee ki-me-o phrase that’s prominent in Mama’s song:

Ke-mo, ki-mo spare-o-spare
Ma-hi, ma-ho, ma-rump-sticka-pumpernickle
Soup-bang, nip-cat, polly-mitcha-cameo
I love you.

As recently as 1997, the 2nd South Carolina String Band released a version of “Kemo Kimo” on their album of “Favorite Camp Songs of the Civil War.” I was pleased to find that their version mentions a frog who lived in a pool (a spring?). However, unlike in Mama’s song, this frog could sing, and reportedly could dance, too. I present it below, but you’ll have to overlook the mildly racist lyrics that you’d expect from a Civil War song from the South.

This version contains the phrase Kitty, can’t you ki me oh that’s tantalizingly close to Kitchee kitchee ki-me-o. Here’s a portion of the lyrics:

There was a frog he lived in a pool
Sure, he was the biggest fool
For he could dance and he could sing
And make all the woods around him ring
Sing song, Kitty, can't you ki me oh

The closest thing I’ve found to Mama’s song is on a blogsite at which the many versions of “Frog Went A Courtin’” are discussed. One user wrote in response that her grandmother, who was from Indiana, sang the following version to her in the early 1950s:

There once was a frog that lived by the spring
Sing song Polly won’t you ki-me-o
He had such a cold he could not sing
Sing song Polly won’t you ki-me-o
Key mo, Ki mo, there beware, me-i, me-o
With a rump steak pomadoodle
Soup back paddle
In come a nip-cat
Sing song Polly won’t you ki-me-o.

My search has by no means been exhaustive, but that’s purty dang close.

I’m left with the impression that all of these variations were made up of verbal fragments that had no direct or logical relationship to each other, but were drawn from a floating pool of hundreds, maybe thousands, of disconnected verses and nonsense one-liners and rhyming couplets. No doubt there were some regional favorites orally passed down by families through numerous generations with countless mutations along the way, similar to the way a whispered phrase gets garbled as it’s passed from one person to the next in a game of ‘Telephone.’ I hope to look further into this topic, but my most immediate interest is in knowing if any of my cousins remember singing or hearing Papa Bond’s version that I grew up with. I’d also be curious to know whether any of my readers have a ‘Kemo Kimo’ song, of whatever version, in your family heritage. Therefore I’m putting out the call. Let me hear from one and all. Tell me what you know. Kitchee kitchee ki-me-o.

A WORD TO PONDER

bath (noun): an immersing of the body in water, mud, etc., also a quantity of water, etc., for bathing. From Old English bæð, Old Saxon bath, Old Norse bað, Middle Dutch bat, German Bad). Ultimately from the Proto Indo-European root bhē- meaning “to warm” + -thuz (a Germanic suffix indicating “an act, process, or condition” that gives the th suffix applied to several English words, such as birth, death, etc.).
etymonline.com

SONG OF THE DAY

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Bob Dylan (Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)

There’s much about the rhyming and meter of this song that puts it alongside many nonsense songs, particularly the third verse:

Get sick, get well
Hang around a ink well
Ring bell, hard to tell
If anything is goin’ to sell
Try hard, get barred
Get back, write braille
Get jailed, jump bail
Join the army, if you fail