{"id":128779,"date":"2018-08-24T09:00:40","date_gmt":"2018-08-24T13:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=128779"},"modified":"2018-08-24T17:46:16","modified_gmt":"2018-08-24T21:46:16","slug":"ms-lucys-steamboat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/08\/24\/ms-lucys-steamboat\/","title":{"rendered":"Ms. Lucy’s Steamboat"},"content":{"rendered":"

My seven-year-old recently reminded me, after thirty years of\u00a0forgetting, that there’s a sinister underground current of folk songs\u00a0being traded on the schoolyards of America, behind garden sheds and\u00a0under slides, away from the watchful eyes of what in my time were\u00a0called “yard duties”.<\/span><\/p>\n

What’s amazing about these songs is that there are dozens of them that\u00a0seem to be pretty much universal, both geographically and across\u00a0generations. The one below should certainly be familiar. \u201cMs. Lucy\u201d\u00a0has roots that go back at east as far as early 20th Century\u00a0vaudeville, at which point it was just a single quatrain about a\u00a0steamboat. Over the decades, children all over the country added more\u00a0quatrains and variations, until it became the song that so many people now know almost by instinct.<\/span><\/p>\n

But as familiar as the song may be, it wasn’t until I applied my\u00a0time-hardened analytical ear to the lyrics that I realized just how\u00a0strange and wonderful they are. So of course I had to draw them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Songs like these have a funny, complex life of their own, slowly\u00a0getting modified and updated, while retaining a few anachronisms. My\u00a0daughter knows what a “TV set” is, for example, even though she\u2019s\u00a0never encountered one “in real life.” In the same way, I knew what a\u00a0steamboat was at age seven because it was already stamped on the\u00a0culture as a clich\u00e9 in cartoons.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are other schoolyard songs I could’ve illustrated that are way\u00a0funnier, but they’re in such horribly poor taste that they’ll have to\u00a0wait until I’m too worn and crotchety to worry about offending the\u00a0public. In any case, I love the teasing word play in this one, and\u00a0can’t get over that it’s been with me, dormant, all these years. It’s\u00a0probably a good place to hang the blame on all the hack work I\u2019ve\u00a0subsequently churned out as a freelancer<\/span><\/p>\n

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Jason Novak is a cartoonist in Oakland, California.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My seven-year-old recently reminded me, after thirty years of\u00a0forgetting, that there’s a sinister underground current of folk songs\u00a0being traded on the schoolyards of America, behind garden sheds and\u00a0under slides, away from the watchful eyes of what in my time were\u00a0called “yard duties”. What’s amazing about these songs is that there are dozens of them that\u00a0seem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":312,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30980],"tags":[35149,35148,2927],"class_list":["post-128779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics","tag-ms-lucy","tag-school-yard-rhymes","tag-vaudeville"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMs. Lucy's Steamboat by Jason Novak<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 24, 2018 \u2013 My seven-year-old recently reminded me, after thirty years of\u00a0forgetting, that there's a sinister underground current of folk songs\u00a0being traded on the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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