| One of the marvels of the web is the way it enables you to track down just about any bit of trivia or other cultural detritus. There's no predicting what will stick to the pipes in 60 years of living. Today, puttering in the garden, a phrase from some half-remembered adolescent ditty surfaced, lyrics sung to the tune of Antonin Dvorak's "Humoresque No. 7." So I Googled it. Lo and behold:
Invitation to A Shotgun Wedding
Was it you that did the pushin',
left the stains upon the cushion,
Footprints on the dashboard upside down?
Was it you, you sly woodpecker,
got into my girl Rebecca,
If it was, you better leave this town.
The reply:
Yes, 'twas I that did the pushin',
left the stains upon the cushion,
Footprints on the dashboard upside down.
But since I got into your daughter
I've had trouble passing water
So I think we're even all around.
Why would this become known as "Invitation to A Shotgun Wedding" when the accused is getting run out of town instead of forced to the altar? Beats me. Apparently it's anonymous. Here's a variant, from page 182 of Jerry Silverman's Folk Song Encyclopedia, Volume II, published by Chappell and Co., 1975:
Passengers will please refrain
from using toilets while the train
is standing in the station,
I love you.
Therefore we urge constipation
when the train is in the station,
Moonlight always makes me
think of you.
My favorite pastime after dark
is goosing statues in the park,
if Sherman's horse can take it
why can't you?
I'm the guy that did the pushin',
put the stains upon the cushion,
footprints on the dashboard upside down.
When you have to pass some water,
do it in the place you oughter,
please don't use my hat and be a pal.
Picture, please, your consternation
and your righteous indignation
if you found your hat a urinal.
Nothing looks much better
than a girl who wears a sweater
though she may not be as big as she appears.
Remember boys before you wed her
best investigate the sweater
or your wedding night may end in tears.
When you have a natural urge,
or after you have had a purge,
the management requests you learn the art
of using roses or wisteria
between the parts of your posterior:
guaranteed to camouflage a fart.
And a few more, from another online source:
If you really must pass water
Kindly call the Pullman porter
He'll place a vessel in your vestibule.
As I sit here tearing tissue
Oh, my darling, how I miss you
Everything I do, I do for you.
There's another batch here. Probably there's much more out there, from which Silverman made a judicious selection. Perhaps someone should create a compendium, on which basis we could stage a concert to perform the complete series (as complete as we can make it, anyhow). We'd do it to celebrate Dvorak's birthday, September 8th, 1841. I see a massed choir . . .
Amazing that, in my own lifetime, literate people of college age and older would consider such stuff even naughty. I can remember working for my undergraduate newspaper in the early 1960s and joining in a chorus of voices both male and female lilting this ditty in the print shop late at night while the typesetters had a smoke and we struggled to meet our deadline.
I should probably add that these were mostly urban white kids. Can't imagine any black kid our age who'd grown up with rhythm and blues and soul music considering this anything more than honky bullshit. Country blues and even electrified city blues had fallen out of fashion in the Black community by then, but the frank appreciation of sexuality that marked those forms had transmuted intact into r&b and soul lyrics.
To be fair to my ofay classmates, we also listened to that music, recognizing and responding to its erotic charge. And we probably dredged those "Humoresque" parodies up out of our then still-recent high-school memories because, at 3 a.m., no one had the energy to lead us into James Brown's "Sex Machine."
Still, would anyone except Bart and Lisa Simpson find this funny now? Mostly a bunch of clever cacadoodoo jokes, with a bit of smut thrown in. Even Beavis and Butthead would sneer at it. Is it possible that, somewhere in the U.S.A., anyone over the age of ten is singing those words today? Makes me wish for a theme park of teenagedom from the time that condition was invented -- just post-World War II -- through the present.
The movies serve as a vicarious, dematerialized version of that, but wouldn't it be fun to go somewhere again to steal a smoke in the boys' room, sing this dumb song after class, pet breathlessly but frustratingly with a girl in someone's basement den, drink chianti from a raffia-wrapped bottle, and puke your guts out while going home at midnight?
Actually . . . no. There's a good reason we leave some things behind.
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