







































VOLUME 42 

Children's 
Folklore 
Review-

2024 



 



CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE REVIEW 
 
 

Editor: K. Brandon Barker, c/o Dept. of Folklore & Ethnomusicology, Indiana 
University, 800 E 3rd Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47408, USA; barkerbr@indiana.edu 

Editorial Board: Simon J. Bronner, Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg; Jay Mechling, 
University of California, Davis; Priscilla Ord, McDaniel College; Elizabeth Tucker, 

Binghamton University 

Reviews Editor: Spencer L. Green, Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg 

 
CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE REVIEW (ISSN: 0739:5558) is an online, open-access journal published 
once a year by the Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society. 

 
The CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE REVIEW regularly publishes articles on all aspects of children's 
traditions: oral, customary, and material culture. In addition, CFR will consider articles 
dealing with the use of folklore in children's literature, children's folklore and education, 
children's folklore and popular culture, children’s folklore and the internet, play studies, and 
similar topics. Articles are refereed and are indexed by the MLA and other major 
bibliographies. 

 
Manuscripts submitted for consideration should conform to the author-date format of the 
Chicago Manual of Style (2010). Manuscripts should be submitted as Word documents; 
illustrations should be submitted in “JPEG” or “TIFF” form with a resolution of 300 dpi or 
higher. 

 
Please submit manuscripts to https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/cfr/index or by 
emailing the editor, K. Brandon Barker, barkerbr@indiana.edu. 

 
CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE SECTION OFFICERS 

 
Senior Convener: K. Brandon Barker, Indiana University 
Treasurer: Priscilla Ord, McDaniel College  
Secretary: Brant Ellsworth, Central Penn College 
Aesop Prize Committee Chair: Brant Ellsworth, Central Penn College 
Opie Prize Committee Chairs: Elizabeth Tucker, Binghamton University    
     and John McDowell, Indiana University 
W.W. Newel Prize Committee Chairs: K. Brandon Barker, Indiana University and    
    Stephen Lochetto, Penn State Harrisburg 

mailto:barkerbr@indiana.edu
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/cfr/index
mailto:brantellsworth@centralpenn.edu


 



 

   Children’s Folklore Review 
 

Special Issue 
The Texas Children’s Folklore Project 

 
 
 

Volume 42 
Number 1 

2024 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

PUBLISHED BY THE 

CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE SECTION OF THE AMERICAN FOLKLORE SOCIETY 



 



SPECIAL ISSUE  

THE TEXAS CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE PROJECT (TCFP) 

CONTENTS 

From the Editor 1 

PART I. NEW REFLECTIONS ON THE TEXAS CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE PROJECT 

The Texas Children’s Folklore Project: RICHARD BAUMAN 5 
A Retrospective 

On the Street with Austin’s Chicano Kids JOHN HOLMES MCDOWELL   17 

Play and the Performance of Children’s Folklore: BEVERLY J. STOELTJE  37 
Opportunities for Learning 

PART II. REVISITING THREE PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED TCFP WORKS 

Ethnography of Children’s Folklore RICHARD BAUMAN 61 

Riddling and Enculturation:  JOHN HOLMES MCDOWELL   87 
A Glance at the Cerebral Child 

Children’s Handclaps: BEVERLY J. STOELTJE 103 
Informal Learning in Play  
(digitized version of original instructional book) 

PART III. TEXAS CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE PROJECT: A BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Texas Children’s Folklore Project: JOHN HOLMES MCDOWELL 147 
A Bibliography 



 



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From the Editor 
 

This special issue of Children’s Folklore Review is dedicated to the work of the Texas 
Children’s Folklore Project (TCFP), which took place in Austin, Texas in the 1970s. The 
contributors to this this special issue are Richard Bauman, leader of the TCFP, and John 
McDowell and Beverly Stoeltje, who worked with the TCFP as graduate student 
researchers. Children’s folklorists—all folklorists—are aware of the immensely 
successful careers of these scholars, and Part I of this issue consists of new contributions 
from each.  

The insights in the new pieces are many. Bauman’s article, “The Texas Children’s 
Folklore Project: A Retrospective,” provides, for example, historical context on 
wrongheaded deprivationist theories held by many scientists and teachers in the 
seventies. Where deprivationists saw a lack in the communicative and expressive 
practices of working class and minority children, folklorists working with the TCFP 
found playful, artistic, and cognitive virtuosity. McDowell’s fresh reflections in “On the 
Streets with Austin’s Chicano Kids” reinforce just how important it is for children’s 
folklorists to get our feet on the ground—on the playgrounds, in backyards, and in the 
neighborhoods—so we can directly observe children’s expressive performances in 
natural, unmediated socioecological contexts. Moreover, the highly creative 
multilingual speech play that McDowell documented on Austin’s streets highlights the 
fertile grounds for expressive culture that multicultural communities provide. Stoeltje’s 
thoughtful new piece, entitled “Play and the Performance of Children’s Folklore: 
Opportunities for Learning,” also focuses on her fieldwork. She discusses doing a kind 
of insider fieldwork with a group of youths that included her own children. In private 
and semi-private spaces, Stoeltje had front-row access to the group’s folkloric 
performances in which the kids rejoice in cultural taboos, playing the clown, and 
making sense of nonsense. Having done my own fieldwork with groups of youths that 
included my children over the past decade, I am fascinated and inspired by the timeless 
pertinence of Stoeltje’s intimate analyses.  

I highly encourage readers to listen to the selections from McDowell’s and Stoeltje’s 
original field recordings that are linked in their essays in Part I. For those audio files, I 
thank Alan Burdette and Allison McClanahan, who while working with the Archives of 
Traditional Music at Indiana University, completed the crucial task of digitizing the 
original audiotape recordings. Their help was invaluable.      

Part II of this issue consists of previously written and previously published articles, 
including Bauman’s “Ethnography of Children’s Folklore” (1982) and McDowell’s 
“Riddling and Enculturation: A Glance at the Cerebral Child” (1976). The issue 

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concludes with Stoeltje’s complete instructional book, Children’s Handclaps: Informal 
Learning in Play (1978). I am very pleased to say that, until now, none of the 
contributions to this special issue have been published in an easily accessed, high-
quality digital format.  

Of the many challenging ideas located in the older pieces, I have my own idiosyncratic 
reasons for noting that the problem of adultocentrism, first introduced by Bauman in 
“Ethnography of Children’s Folklore,” the question of how children’s play forms are 
connected to human development of higher-order, role-based relational reasoning, as 
discussed by McDowell in “Riddling and Enculturation,” and the youthful forms of 
body acquisition that accompany children’s performances of complex handclap 
routines, as demonstrated in Stoeltje’s instructional book, are issues that remain just as 
relevant today to the lives of children and to the work of children’s folklorists as they 
were a half-century prior. No doubt, readers will make their own discoveries as they 
(re)read these works. 

Two further acknowledgements: The authors and I thank Jay Mechling for encouraging 
Children’s Folklore Review to pursue a special issue on the TCFP. Additionally, 
Beverly Stoeltje would like to acknowledge the major role her daughters, Gretchen 
Stoeltje and Rachael Stoeltje, played in her research.  They were engaged, even 
enthusiastic, about the project, the boundary between spontaneous and requested 
performance being quite fluid. Their names were changed in the Counting-Out 
performance write-up to Gina and Suzy. 

For my part, reading (and rereading) this gathering of new and old TCFP publications, I 
am immediately impressed by TCFP’s bountiful outputs. Look over the bibliography of 
TCFP publications (Part III, page 147 in this issue). The list includes twenty-one articles 
and working papers; two dissertations; and four books—including John McDowell’s 
Children’s Riddling (1979), a book that won the Chicago Folklore Prize, and Margaret 
Brady’s “Some Kind of Power”: Navajo Children’s Skinwalker Narratives (1984), a book that I 
believe demonstrates some of our discipline’s most clever and penetrating 
methodologies for gathering folk narratives from youths.  

All in all, the TCFP must be considered one of the most successful research programs 
into the nature of children’s folklore ever conducted in the United States. 

K. Brandon Barker  
Indiana University  
Bloomington 

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Part I  
 

New Reflections on 
The Texas Children’s Folklore Project 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 



 



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The Texas Children’s Folklore Project 
A Retrospective 

 
Richard Bauman 

Indiana University, Emeritus 

 
In this introductory essay, I present an overview of the historical and institutional context, the 
motivating ideology, the methodological framework, and the research foci of the Texas 
Children’s Folklore Project, conducted from 1973-1976 by a team of faculty and graduate 
students from the University of Texas under the auspices of the Southwest Educational 
Laboratory. 
 

 

From 1973-1976, I directed a research project on children’s folklore under the 

auspices of the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) in Austin, 

Texas. The project yielded a number of publications that suggest the principal frames of 

reference that guided our work1 but not necessarily the motivating factors that led me 

to undertake it in the first place or the elements of time, place, and organization that 

gave it shape and direction. This essay, then, is intended to fill some of those gaps, 

though at a remove of more than 50 years and in the absence of concrete records that 

would allow for more detail and precision. Those files, alas, fell by the wayside in the 

course of several moves and office clear-outs, but memory, conversations with 

surviving participants, and the published record bring back at least the basic contours 

of the enterprise. 

 

The politics of education in Texas in the early 1970s 

Texas, like other southern states with a long history of segregation, was 

conspicuously resistant to the kinds of efforts at integration mandated by Brown v. 

Board of Education in 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nevertheless, 

notwithstanding the foot-dragging of top-level administrative officials, there were a few 

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staunch staff members at the Texas Education Agency (TEA) who made efforts, 

beginning in the late 1960s, to respond constructively to the need for redressive and 

compensatory measures to overcome the deeply detrimental effects of a century of 

segregated schooling. 

 One such effort, organized by Mary Galvan of TEA in partnership with Rudolph 

Troike, a linguist in the University of Texas English department, was the East Texas 

Dialect Project, launched in 1967 with funding from the Elementary and Secondary 

Education Act (ESEA), signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. Among its 

wide-ranging provisions, the law provided federal grants to state educational agencies 

to improve the quality of elementary and secondary education. The substantive focus of 

the project in East Texas was “To study the language patterns which exist in Texas, 

particularly the phonology and syntax which have most bearing on learning” (Galvan 

and Troike 1972[1969]:298). A critical turning point in the project’s development was the 

discovery by fieldworkers of “extralinguistic” factors (i.e., factors beyond the initial 

focal elements of phonology and syntax) that seemed to have significant implications 

for understanding language use on the part of African American children. 

Specifically—perhaps unexpectedly—the fieldworkers began to amass a corpus of 

children’s folklore forms—“rope-skipping rhymes, game songs, and narrative 

accounts” as well as “verbal contests”—the dynamics of which could not be grasped 

satisfactorily in formal linguistic terms. As recounted by the principal investigators, 

“About this point, the project was fortunate in acquiring the consultative services of 

another University of Texas staff member, a folklorist with a specialty in Negro culture, 

whose role was to explain many cultural patterns of behavior to staff members. His 

contribution became larger as time passed and is at present [i.e., in 1969] equally 

important as the linguists’” (Galvan and Troike 1972:299). That folklorist was Roger 

Abrahams, Troike’s colleague in UT’s English department. African American children’s 

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folklore was a significant component of Roger’s dissertation research in South 

Philadelphia (Abrahams 1962) and at the time he joined the East Texas Dialect Project 

team he was at work on Jump-rope Rhymes: A Dictionary (1969). Roger’s contribution, 

and that of Américo Paredes who joined up in the next phase of the project as it 

expanded into Mexican American South Texas, cemented the place of folklorists in 

subsequent compensatory efforts on the part of TEA. All this is to say that just as the UT 

Folklore Program was getting fully under way with the establishment of the Center for 

Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Oral History (“the Folklore Center”) in the Spring 

of 1968 (see Bauman 2020), children’s folklore was becoming a significant component of 

the intellectual environment for UT folklorists. 

In the aftermath of the East Texas Dialect Project, TEA established a consulting 

committee, including Roger and Américo, to assist in the development of intercultural 

education programs but the politics of culture in Texas and the continued foot-dragging 

on the part of top-level leadership at TEA precluded any real progress. Pressures 

increased significantly, though, in 1971 with the handing down of Civil Action 5281, a 

federal court order issued in response to a lawsuit challenging continued efforts to 

circumvent integration (The School Desegregation in Texas Policy Research Project 

1982). Sweeping in its scope, encompassing the entire state, the order contained 

multiple provisions addressing demographic and administrative problems and policies, 

but one section addressed “Curriculum and Compensatory Education” and placed TEA 

in charge of monitoring and enforcement. This responsibility provided an impetus to 

elevating the consulting committee, now under the rubric of the “Confluence of Texan 

Cultures,” with a charge that included “the provision of programs to compensate 

students for the ill effects of previously segregated schools” and “the development of a 

statewide design to educate the disadvantaged.”2 Membership on the committee, as it 

turned out, was not without its frustrations as efforts to slow-walk the process within 

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TEA and to circumvent its implementation out in the state at large persisted, but for the 

time being, into the mid-1970s, children’s folklore remained of at least professed interest 

to the agency as a resource that would serve the interest of compensatory program 

development and acknowledge the cultural heritage of “the disadvantaged.” 

It is important to recall that this period in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was the 

heyday of deprivationist ideologies on the part of educationists and psychologist—even 

liberal ones—concerning the verbal and cognitive abilities of working class and 

minority kids and their low performance in the nation’s public schools. In the pithy 

critical summary offered by Joan Baratz, 
 

The educators were the first to contribute a statement about the language 

difficulties of these children, a statement that amounted to the fact that these 

children were virtually verbally destitute—i.e., they couldn’t talk and if they did, 

their speech was deviant and filled with “errors.” The next group to get into the 

fray—the psychologists—reconfirmed initially that the children didn’t talk, and 

then added the sophisticated wrinkle that if they did talk, their speech was such 

that it was a deterrent to cognitive growth. [Baratz 1969:87] 
 

 To folklorists even superficially familiar with the kinds of verbal, cognitive, and 

interactional skills—even virtuosity—that these very children were able to display out 

in the schoolyard, the neighborhood, and the home, these deprivationist portraits 

simply did not ring true. The interventionist efforts that those of us at UT and our 

colleagues elsewhere sought to bring to bear were based on our understanding that 

what kids knew and could do with regard to language and the associated skills 

demonstrated in their play activities would provide a critical corrective to notions of 

verbal and cognitive disability and a basis for enriching educational programs that 

would compensate for and redress the damaging effects of segregated schooling. 

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At the same time that Roger and Américo were engaged in these state-focused 

efforts, I became involved in similarly motivated project sponsored by the American 

Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA), the national professional organization of 

speech pathologists and audiologists in the U.S. Collegial connections with faculty and 

graduate students in Speech and Hearing at UT drew me into a consultative role with 

ASHA as it too attempted to come to terms with linguistic and cultural diversity and 

overcome a deeply entrenched bias toward monoglot standard English and the 

ideologies that sustained it. My efforts, in a 1970 workshop and subsequent article 

(Bauman 1970), were directed at suggesting the productiveness of a relativist, 

ethnographic perspective on language as a critical corrective to the ethnocentric biases 

that prevailed among the vast majority of speech pathologists and speech therapists 

engaged with school-aged children. In particular, I advocated for the value of children’s 

folklore as a vantage point on what minority children knew and could do with 

language. 

 

The Texas Children’s Folklore Project 

The foregoing overview is prologue, but it suggests why I should have been 

receptive when Bob Randall came to see me as director of the UT Folklore Center, 

sometime in the fall of 1972. Bob was the head of the Early Childhood Program at the 

Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL), one of a network of research 

and development centers and regional educational laboratories authorized in 1965 

under Title VI of the ESEA, the same agency that funded the East Texas Dialect Project, 

and subsequently transferred to the newly created National Institute of Education (NIE) 

in 1972. The Early Childhood Program was charged with research and program 

development for children in kindergarten through third grade, roughly, 5-9 years old. 

Bob’s own interests centered on informal learning, that is, learning that takes place 

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primarily outside or in the margins of formal educational institutions and without 

formal instruction. Children’s folklore was on Texas educators’ radar by this time and 

Bob wanted to explore with me the possibility that SEDL might sponsor a research 

project in the area with the potential to serve a basis for educational programs that built 

on the verbal, cognitive, and interactional energies and strengths of cultural forms that 

were child-initiated and directed and pleasurable to the participants. Moreover, given 

that the children’s folklore forms were rooted in their own communities, they might 

provide a mechanism for the kids to work out their own adaptations to 

multiculturalism in newly integrated schools. The outcome of our conversation was that 

I agreed to direct the project that Bob envisioned under the auspices of SEDL. For me, 

the venture was multiply appealing: it was an opportunity to put my money where my 

mouth was, doing primary research that was at the same time oriented to important 

applied ends and it was a way to support UT graduate students and get them involved 

in fieldwork that was socially engaged, motivated at least in part by real world social 

problems. 

During the spring of 1973, SEDL administrators and I worked out the 

arrangements and launched the project. I would teach a graduate course on children’s 

folklore that would serve as a venue for recruiting and training potential fieldworkers 

as well as exploring foci for research that would suit their interests and those of the 

overall project and include kids from the three predominant ethnic groups in Texas: 

African American, Anglo American, and Mexican American. During the academic year 

of 1973-74, I would take a leave of absence from UT to work full time on the project. 

Our responsibility was primary research, defined in scholarly terms. SEDL would 

handle all the bureaucratic work, mediate between us and NIE, provide leads to Austin-

area schools that would allow us to work with their kids, and do the work of adapting 

our findings to school-oriented programs when the time came. Altogether, seven UT 

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graduate students worked on the project: Meg Brady, Rosalind Eckhardt, John 

McDowell, Andrea Meditch, Danielle Roemer, Beverly Stoeltje, and Dorothy Stroman. 

Meg and Beverly were experienced teachers, returned to UT as doctoral students in 

folklore and Beverly had kids of her own, which enhanced her participation in the 

project. As the project developed, solicitational routines (riddles, knock-knock jokes, 

catches), ring games, line plays, and handclaps emerged as the principal substantive 

foci of our research. 

 

Project guidelines and research foci 

The guidelines for project research were shaped by the conceptual and 

methodological principles of the ethnography of speaking, then entering what 

amounted to the second major phase of its development. Following on the 

programmatic phase of the 1960s, a cadre of young researchers had carried the 

approach into the field as a framework for their own primary research and by the early 

1970s they were ready to report on the results of their efforts. At the time of my 

involvement in the TCFP, I was engaged, with Joel Sherzer, in the organization, 

conduct, and aftermath of the Conference on the Ethnography of Speaking, held at UT 

in April of 1972 to bring these researchers together and followed by the publication of 

Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (Bauman and Sherzer 1974) and a review 

essay of the field (Bauman and Sherzer 1975). At the same time, in a related effort, I was 

engaged in formulating a concept of performance as a display of virtuosic skill and 

efficacy, presented initially in the American Anthropologist in 1975 and in expanded form 

in the book version of Verbal Art as Performance (Bauman 1975, 1977). 

 There are abundant bodies of literature on the ethnography of speaking and 

performance so there is no need to recapitulate their founding principles and 

subsequent development here. A few key points may be useful, however. First, the 

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notion of performance was central to the TCFP in two fundamental senses, both rooted 

in the ethnography of speaking: (a) performance as practice, that is, the social use of 

communicative forms in the conduct of social life, with a focus on acts, events, 

participant roles and structures, emergent outcomes; (b) performance in the more 

marked sense of virtuosic display, especially important as a critical corrective to 

deprivationist models. Second, our focus was developmental, attentive to the 

acquisition of competence in the use of the folklore forms in the children’s repertoires. 

How did children acquire and manifest the knowledge and ability to use these forms in 

socially appropriate and intelligible ways? This concern required that we record and 

analyze what amounted to incompetent as well as fully competent attempts to engage 

in riddling or perform handclaps as novice performers tried them out on the way to 

being able to accomplish and evaluate fully competent performances and ultimately to 

attain reflexive awareness of how the various forms are made, used, evaluated, and 

even, perhaps, parodied or subverted in inversive counterplay. The standard of social 

appropriateness that guided our work was child-centered: if participants judged and 

responded to a performance as skillful, enjoyable, and engaging, it was socially 

appropriate, even if, by strict adult or school-centric terms it was obscene, scatological, 

or otherwise transgressive. Third, again consistent with the charter of the ethnography 

of speaking, our assumption was that engagement in children’s folklore was cross-

culturally variable and to be discovered ethnographically. Thus, as noted earlier, we 

built into our research protocol fieldwork with children from all three of the major 

ethnic groups in Texas, Anglo American, African American, Mexican American. Finally, 

in addition to variation by age and ethnicity, we were attentive to gender variation in 

repertoire, participation, and development. 

Outcomes 

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It’s difficult to know whether or to what extent the research findings produced 

by the TCFP made their way into early elementary education. By the terms of our 

arrangement with SEDL, we submitted our materials and reports to them and they were 

to take over from there in developing educational programs based on what we 

provided. I do recall a mockup of a booklet of riddles drawn from our corpus, but I’m 

unsure whether it ever found a publisher or made its way into schools. The lab did 

support the production of two brief books, one consisting of essays by Meg and 

Rosalind on African American girls’ participation in a variety of play forms, at times in 

interaction with their Anglo and Mexican American classmates (Brady and Eckhardt 

1975), and one by Beverly on handclaps (Stoeltje 1978). Both works combined scholarly 

documentation and analysis with teacher-oriented explication and feedback to the 

authors indicates that some teachers, at least, found the works interesting and useful. 

Just how they were used, who knows? I need hardly say that the lab people paid no 

attention to the transgressive materials that we collected. Some were even a tad 

suspicious of data that suggested that children manipulated forms like counting-out 

rhymes or engaged in inversive clowning against the grain of orderly performances 

considering that those materials somehow compromised the mainstream ideology of 

childhood innocence. 

 For the graduate-student researchers who worked on the project, there were a 

number of clear payoffs, even beyond the financial support they received for their 

work. Several went on to do further research on children’s folklore. Danielle and John 

produced Ph.D. dissertations based on the research they carried out under the auspices 

of the project (McDowell 1975; Roemer 1977). Meg extended her engagement with 

children’s folklore in her subsequent dissertation research and book on Navajo 

children’s Skinwalker stories (Brady 1984). Danielle, John, Meg, and Beverly all went on 

to teach courses devoted to children’s folklore or including a significant component of 

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children’s folklore in more general courses, such as American folklore. And for all 

participants, I believe, the project offered a focused initiation into the world of socially 

engaged scholarship. I know that for all those participants who went on to teach, 

bringing that engaged stance into the classroom had a multiplier effect. Over the 

decades since the early ‘70s, the work of the TCFP colored the educational experience of 

a lot of college students. We can hope that it made a difference in their understanding of 

the strengths and challenges of cultural and linguistic diversity and what they might 

offer to a humane multicultural society. In the end, I believe, no one who has 

considered closely the semantic intricacy of a children’s riddling session can doubt their 

cognitive abilities; no one who has analyzed the poetic and kinesic intricacy of a 

handclap session can doubt their capacity for verbal virtuosity; no one who has 

observed the structural acuity of a schoolyard clown in his inversive parody of a line 

play, can question his capacity for reflexive awareness; and no one who has witnessed 

the social finesse of a girl leading a ring play can deny her rhetorical skill and 

effectiveness in managing complex interaction. 

 

Richard Bauman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana 
University, Bloomington. The principal foci of his research include narrative, oral poetics, 
performance, genre, and language ideologies. Among his publications are Verbal Art as 
Performance (1977), Let Your Words Be Few (1983), Story, Performance, and Event (1986), 
Voices of Modernity (with Charles L. Briggs, 2003; Sapir Prize 2006), A World of Others’ 
Words (2004), and A Most Valuable Medium (2023). Bauman has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a 
fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of the Lifetime Scholarly 
Achievement Award of the American Folklore Society, and the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary 
Service to Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. 
 

References Cited 

Abrahams, Roger D. 1962. Negro Folklore from South Philadelphia: A Collection and       
Analysis. Ph. D. dissertation in Folklore, University of Pennsylvania. 

_____. 1969. Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary. Austin: University of Texas Press. 

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Baratz, Joan. 1969. “Language and Cognitive Assessment of Negro Children: 
Assumptions and Research Needs.” ASHA 11(3) :87-91 
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED022157.pdf 

Bauman, Richard. 1970. “An Ethnographic Framework for the Investigation of 
Communicative Behaviors.” ASHA 13:334-340. 

_____. 1975. “Verbal Art as Performance.” American Anthropologist 77(2): 290-311. 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/674535 

_____. 1977. Verbal Art as Performance. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. 

_____. 2020. “The Texas School.” In Folklore in the United States and Canada: An 
Institutional History, Patricia Sawin and Rosemary Zumwalt, eds., pp. 129-141. 
Bloomington: Indiana University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16h2ngc.14 

Bauman, Richard and Joel Sherzer, eds. 1974. Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

_____. 1975. “The Ethnography of Speaking.” Annual Review of Anthropology 4:95-119. 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2949351 

Brady, Margaret. 1984. “Some Kind of Power”: Navajo Children’s Skinwalker Narratives. Salt 
Lake City: University of Utah Press. 

Brady, Margaret and Rosalind Eckhardt. 1975. Black Girls at Play: Folkloric Perspectives on 
Child Development. Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. 

Galvan, Mary and Rudolph Troike. 1972. “The East Texas Dialect Project: A Pattern for 
Education.” In Language and Cultural Diversity in American Education, ed. Roger D. 
Abrahams and Rudolph Troike, pp. 297-304. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 

McDowell, John 1975. The Speech Play and Verbal Art of Chicano Children: An Ethnographic 
and Sociolinguistic Study. Ph.D. dissertation in Folklore, University of Texas, 
Austin. 

Roemer, Danielle. 1977. A Social Interactional Analysis of Children’s Folklore: Catches and 
Narratives. Ph.D. dissertation in Folklore, University of Texas, Austin. 

Stoeltje, Beverly. 1978. Children's Handclaps: Informal Learning in Play.  Austin, TX: 
Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. 

The School Desegregation in Texas Policy Research Project. 1982. School Desegregation in 
Texas: The Implementation of United States v. State of Texas. Lyndon B. Johnson 
School of Public Affairs Policy Research Project Report No. 51. Austin, TX: 
Lyndon B. Johnson School Of Public Affairs. 

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https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED022157.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/674535
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16h2ngc.14
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1 See the TCFP bibliography (page 147) in this issue. 
2 L. Harlan Ford to Américo Paredes, 9/17/71. Américo Paredes Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Library, 
University of Texas, Austin. 

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On the Street with Austin’s Chicano Kids 
John Holmes McDowell 

Indiana University, Emeritus 
 

These pages offer a retrospective on my time with the Texas Children’s Folklore Project, which 
set me in motion to document the verbal play of Chicano children in Austin, Texas. After a short 
overview of the field collection assembled there, I address its core elements in relation to 
techniques that enabled me to get the work done, a small set of events that stand out in my 
memory as exemplary, and a surmise of analytical themes emerging from my encounter with 
those lively youngsters and their repertories. My essay is supplemented by a selection of rhymes 
and songs performed by the children, in the form of audio files and corresponding transcriptions 
and (as needed) translations. 

 

My awareness of the big picture of the Texas Children’s Folklore Project (TCFP) 

was quite limited. I knew that it was coordinated by Richard Bauman, my mentor and 

contact for the project, that it had a regional hub in the Southwest Educational 

Development Laboratory (SEDL), and that there was federal funding from the 

Department of Education. I was aware that the project proposed gathering samples of 

children’s folklore, primarily in the form of verbal art performances in their natural, 

peer-group settings, with representation from the three main ethnic groups in Austin, 

the Anglos, Mexican Americans, and African Americans.1 And I had the idea that these 

field-gathered resources would be the source of educational materials for teachers and 

for use in their classrooms. But mostly, I knew that my job was to collect folklore from 

Chicano kids; that’s what I did, and that’s what I will briefly reflect back on here. 

 How did I get involved in the project? I had come up to Austin from Corpus 

Christi where I was a VISTA volunteer, working with a Community Action Program to 

eradicate poverty, or, at least, assist local Chicano populations in their quest for the 

equal rights owed them as citizens of the nation. I attended in Austin a conference on 

bilingual education, a topic of interest to the Chicano activists I was associating with at 

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the time, and there I met Professor Américo Paredes, who encouraged me to enter 

graduate school at the University of Texas where he was teaching. I did that, entering 

the MA program in Latin American Studies in 1971, and, the MA completed, moving in 

1972 over to the doctoral program in the Folklore Center, with its foothold in both the 

Anthropology and English departments, under the supervision of Professor Richard 

Bauman.2   

 In the spring of 1974 I was recruited by Professor Bauman to work in the Texas 

Children’s Folklore Project, specifically, since I was fluent in Spanish, to collect folklore 

among Mexican American children. This was salaried work, much appreciated at the 

time – I had spent the previous summer painting the exterior of the house I was renting 

in exchange for the summer’s rent money. Moreover, I carried with me a fondness for 

the people and the culture, based on my two-years as a VISTA volunteer, living and 

working in Chicano communities, first with migrant families in the area around 

Hillsboro, Oregon, then in settled communities in the counties around Corpus Christi, 

Texas. Hence, I found the prospect of gathering verbal lore from Chicano kids to be an 

attractive one. So, I signed on and started visiting the neighborhoods in Austin with 

Chicano residents during the spring semester of 1974, continuing these visits over the 

summer months and into the fall of that year.3   

 In these pages, I offer a retrospective on my time with the TCFP. After first 

presenting a short overview of the field collection I assembled, I turn my attention to its 

core elements via a reprise on the techniques I developed to get the work done, an 

account of a small set of events that stand out in my memory as exemplary, and a 

surmise of analytical themes emerging from my encounter with this material. Before I 

commence with this agenda, it’s worth noting that, after preparing as required a report 

for the SEDL replete with my field data, I then wrote my doctoral dissertation thesis on 

this material, highlighting what I viewed as the children’s significant social and 

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cognitive development accomplished through participation in this medium of playful 

communication. This thesis, completed in 1975, is titled The Speech Play and Verbal Art of 

Chicano Children: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study.4 Moreover, the field materials 

gathered during those months in Austin’s neighborhoods and barrios has fueled a 

string of publications over the years, from my first book, Children’s Riddling (IU Press, 

1979), winner of the Chicago Folklore Prize, to a segment in my 2018 book chapter, 

“Transitionality: The Border as Barrier and Bridge,” included in Border Folk Balladeers: 

Critical Studies on Américo Paredes, edited by Roberto Cantú and published by 

Cambridge Press.5 In all, publications making use of these field materials include, in 

addition to this first monograph and the 2018 chapter, eight substantial articles and 

chapters and several smaller pieces (see separate list of publications). During my stint as 

a fieldworker with the TFCP I created a veritable treasure trove of ethnographic field 

materials that has sustained my abiding interest in the remarkable things that children 

achieve through their playful peer-group interaction. 

  Contents of the Collection 

My field collection of Chicano children’s folklore in Austin, Texas, consists of a 

set of nine audio cassette tapes containing over 14 hours of recorded material 

documenting the verbal art and speech play of Chicano children in Austin, Texas, 

recorded in 1974 on the streets and playgrounds of the Clarksville neighborhood and 

East Austin, featuring riddles, stories, taunts, and rhymes and songs of children 

between the ages 4-11 performing in peer groups ranging from two-to-six children and 

occasionally in solo recitations. There is, as well, one recording of a home conjunto 

performance at a birthday party, and there are also a few low-quality photos.6 (See the 

appendix to this essay for sample performances from these recordings.) 

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 While I do not have access to the written report that I produced for the TCFP, I 

do have in hand my 1975 dissertation thesis, which uses that report as a starting point: I 

reproduced in the thesis the majority of the field data meeting basic standards of 

coherency, that is, that could be rendered as items of folkloric performance. In addition 

to scene-setting chapters and chapters on acquisition and enculturation, the thesis has 

chapters on what I call interrogative ludic routines, that is, playful question-answer 

sequences built on the speech act of interrogation, and on narratives, taunts, and 

rhymes and songs. A total of 124 interrogative routines are included in the thesis, 

organized into three categories: descriptive routines (riddle-like questions that contain 

no block element), riddles proper (these do center on a block element that impedes easy 

solving), and routines of victimization (these appear to be riddles but instead facilitate 

miniature acts of aggression). The thesis features transcriptions of fifty narratives, 

organized into several categories; almost half of these belong to the category “spooky 

stories.” The chapter on taunts presents thirty-four taunts from the Palm School 

encounter – more on that to follow. A whopping 183 texts of songs and rhymes are 

presented in the thesis, organized into several categories including items associated 

with games such as handclaps and jumping rope, and items tied to the pursuit of social 

control.   

 Drawing on folkloristic precedents in the study of children’s lore, and attending 

to issues of interest to the student of children’s folklore, I establish the architecture of 

these four genres with their multiple categories to make sense out of the enormous 

stock of material captured on the nine cassette tapes recorded with Austin’s Chicano 

children. These are the expressive forms that attracted the imagination and energy of 

the children, and although they sometimes occurred mixed together in the recording 

sessions, it was useful to separate them out into genre inventories for purposes of 

analysis and interpretation. As can be seen, I found the children to be loquacious, ready 

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and even anxious to display their ability and agility in these verbal forms, to rehearse 

and adapt to the requirements of the present moment the ample resources granted them 

by tradition.  

Field Techniques 

So how did this encounter between the errant folklorist and the resident Chicano 

children transpire? What were the situational factors that made possible the assemblage 

of such a rich harvest of folklore? As this was my first extended fieldwork experience, I 

had no backlog of previous practice to draw upon. In my graduate studies I had read 

commentaries on collecting folklore, but there was no set of orthodox procedures to 

follow. Instead, as I reconstruct the process, I entered this field setting with a few basic 

orientations in mind, and with the expectation that I would improvise as needed to 

assure the free flow of folklore from the children to me and my SONY tape recorder. 

My orientation to the project rested on my conviction that children are capable of 

creating artistic renderings of experience worthy of our respect and even admiration. 

Moreover, I sensed that the verbal repertoires of these Chicano children would be 

especially intriguing, in light of their bilingual and bicultural heritage. I viewed 

children’s folklore is an oral literature indigenous to childhood, and hence thought that 

it should be disentangled to the extent possible from the discourses used in 

communicating with adults.  

 This set of orienting expectations led to a fieldwork technique that revolved 

around documenting children’s folklore in peer-group settings whenever possible. My 

goal was to establish arenas where children would share performance routines with and 

for each other, where my presence and my tape recorder would fade from sight as the 

verbal exchanges among peers became animated. The truth is that I did manage to 

create such arenas, and in these the flow of folkloric performance was a splendid thing 

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to behold. But it was not always possible to do this, and there were other kinds of 

collecting arenas that took shape: lively groups with children competing for my 

attention and for the opportunity to hear their voices replayed on the recorder; and solo 

sessions where I collected repertoires from especially active performers of children’s 

folklore. In one instance, the Palm School encounter, I became the unhappy focal point 

of the children’s attention, as we shall see in the next section of this paper.     

Exemplary Events 

Walking the streets in Clarksville and East Austin was always an interesting 

experience.7 During the summer months of 1974, and on school days in the fall 

afternoons, I would invariably find groups of friends gathered in front yards or by 

curbside, and they were generally agreeable to come sit for a chat with me.8 I will 

highlight here a few exemplary moments, selected from many others, to reveal 

something of the flavor of my fieldwork activity with Chicano children and their 

families. 

Episode 1: Playing the naming game 

The Chicano children I encountered in East Austin, particularly, were conscious 

of their participation in two distinct languages and cultures. The following exchange, 

recorded in June of 1974 in East Austin with a group of five children aged 7-11, shows 

the interest and even delight they bring to this bicultural endowment: 

Raúl: Can you say our names in Spanish? 

Me: What are your names? 

Paula: Paula. 

Me: That’s Spanish already. 

Silvia: Paula (emphasizing the Spanish pronunciation) 

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Rudi: Say Rudi. 

Me: Rudi, ah Rodolfo. 

Adam: Adam. 

Me : Adán. 

Rosemary: Say Rosemary in Spanish. 

Me: Rosamaría. 

Adam: Say Mary Jane. 

Me: María Juana. 

(laughter) 

Adam: What’s your name in Spanish? 

Me: Juan. 

Adam: Juanillo. 

Silvia: Juanillo Río. 

 In my most recent publication drawing on the Austin project, I characterize this 

exchange as follows (McDowell 2018, 96): 

In this flurry of queries about naming, the children focus on me as a friendly 
outsider, even as they display their own fascination with the two parallel naming 
systems in their experience. In addition, the crafty Adam (Adán) lures me into a 
verbal trap, cleverly nudging me into speaking a close approximation to a taboo 
term, marijuana, and Adam and Silvia demonstrate, in the final sequence, the 
productivity of the Spanish component of the system, which allows them to 
frame up innovative riffs off of the Spanish version of my given name: Juanillo, 
Juanillo Río.  
 

Episode 2: “We don’t know any rhymes.”  

I have a vivid memory of walking down a street in East Austin one afternoon, 

and spotting three or four children out in front of a house. I had just begun talking to 

them when two mothers appeared, and, hearing what I was up to, invited me into the 

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backyard to continue the conversation with their children while we had a sip of 

lemonade. But, when I asked the children if they knew any rhymes or riddles, they 

responded, under the close gaze of their mothers, that they didn’t. Amiably, I took my 

leave, but the children followed me to the front of the house. There we reconvened and 

I secured an excellent session of storytelling, and yes, riddles and rhymes. The moral 

here is that children’s lore is native to childhood and, often, an intimate component of it 

– hence, at times, something they might be reluctant to perform in front of their parents. 

Episode 3: “Yeah, that’s the part I don’t get either.”  

A six-year-old child had just performed for me the newspaper riddle – “What’s 

black and white and red (read) all over?” When I asked her why the newspaper was 

“red,” she replied, “Yeah, that’s the part I don’t get either.” Working with children over 

an age-range 4-11 years, I could trace lines of cognitive (and social) development rather 

clearly. One conceptual hurdle in performing and understanding what I call riddles 

proper is the ability to comprehend the reversals that feed the block element, whether 

they be metaphorical, where one object stands in for another, or acoustic, where two 

words sound alike but have different meanings (as in red/read). I found that it was 

roughly around the time of their seventh birthday that kids become competent in these 

tricks of the riddle trade. It turns out that this timing coincides with Jean Piaget’s 

developmental scheme, and with observations on children’s play by child development 

specialists working in laboratory settings (Piaget 1972; McGhee 1976; Shultz 1974; Whitt 

and Prentice 1977). 

Episode 4: Symposium on locomotion.  

This transpired as a group of children explored, over the course of a half-hour, 

the conceptual domain of locomotion -- how things move about in the world. During 

this riddling session, they produced eleven riddle-like routines directed to the ways that 

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animals, machines, and people get about, with legs and wheels, and the number 

thereof, serving as the distinguishing features. In Children’s Riddling, I characterize this 

session as a symposium and argue that “as the theme of locomotion is explored and 

developed, one routine begetting another, one senses that underlying this 

contemplative kind of performance there lurks a rather fully developed folk taxonomy” 

(1979, 137). The symposium on locomotion begins with this routine: “What has eight 

wheels and rolls?” The answer provided is, “roller skates.” But the session also includes 

this riddle: “What has four legs and can’t walk?” The answer here, of course, is “a 

chair.” Hence, I see this symposium moving in two different directions, toward 

confirming a shared set of perceptions about the world, and toward challenging “the 

familiar orders of language and culture” (1979, 143). The upshot, for me, is to recognize 

the cerebral child, who is “concerned in his or her verbal art with complex matters of 

rationality, logic, sociability, and aesthetics” (1979, 144). Like Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 

cerebral savage, the cerebral child needs to be rescued from our complacent disdain and 

celebrated as an ethnographer and creator of culture. 

Episode 5: Palm School encounter.  

Palm School was, and still is, an elementary school in East Austin, and I ventured 

there one weekend afternoon in November in search of children. The aggressive 

attitude of the children I encountered that day stands out as unique across the whole 

gamut of my research ventures for the Texas project. As noted, I include in my 

dissertation (1975) a chapter on taunts, and feature excerpts from the encounter with 

four children, ages 6-10, on the Palm School playground. Presenting this episode as an 

instance of the children testing the investigator and the situation, I describe the action as 

follows: “Verbal taunts were accompanied by physical aggression…as the investigator 

became a recipient of mock blows to the back, head, and shoulder. At one point three or 

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four children climbed on my back and were not easily dislodged. This physical 

aggression was carefully restrained, never reaching the level of actually inflicting 

serious pain. Also worthy of mention is the momentary theft of the investigator’s 

notepad and glasses case, which were returned upon request.” 

 In the pages of that thesis chapter, I analyze the form and content of the verbal 

taunting, noting, for form, that a range of speech acts are exploited, including mock 

riddles, pointed narratives, and derisive and disparaging rhymes; and for content, that 

metaphorical thinking prevails, disparaging the investigator as a non-human creature, 

as a deviant human being, and as a part of the human anatomy. At the time of the Palm 

School encounter, I reasoned that the schoolyard on a weekend afternoon is an 

ambiguous space, where the children are released from the constraints of home and 

family. Such a settling could give rise to behavior lodged at the uncertain zone between 

play and not-play. Looking back at the event, I understand it as well to have been a 

spirited defense of disputed territory, embodying larger societal factors, whereby the 

children are fending off against the intrusion of an agent of the often-oppressive outside 

world. 

Episode 6: Popeye the sailor man.  

I saw in the children’s verbal repertoire an engagement with contemporary 

popular culture that spanned their cultural horizons. For example, in one session, the 

performance of the English-language parody of the Popeye ditty brought to the fore a 

Spanish-language equivalent: 

English version: 

I’m Popeye the sailor man, 

I live in a garbage can, 

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I eat all the worms 

and spit out the germs, 

I’m Popeye the sailor man. 

Spanish version: 

Popeye nació en Torreón   (Popeye was born in Torreón 

encima de un sillón,    on top of a toilet seat, 

mató a su tía     he killed off his aunt 

con una tortilla,     with a tortilla, 

Popeye nació en Torreón.   Popeye was born in Torreón.) 

 It appears that the cartoon protagonist had a presence also in Mexican popular 

media, and that children tuning into this manifestation of it were just as irreverent as 

their peers in the United States. His name, however, comes out quite differently in the 

two languages – in Spanish, it has three syllables, with each “e” ringing forth like the 

vowel sound in the English word “say.” How fortunate the child, I thought at this 

event, who can have fun with Popeye in two languages! 

Emerging Themes 

The underlying political agenda 

At the time the Texas project took shape, there was a sense among academics in 

the social sciences and humanities that we could participate in a redemptive movement, 

helping to redeem socially marginalized populations from commonplace stereotypes 

that deprived them of their agency and even their humanity. For example, the word in 

some circles was that “Chicanos are functionally illiterate in two languages.” Their 

bilingualism was viewed, in these circles, as a negative thing, holding them back in the 

educational system and in the larger society. Inspired by William Labov’s work in 

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recognizing the verbal excellence of urban Black youth culture (1972), I saw my work 

with the Texas project as an opportunity to feature the achievements of Chicano 

children and the advantages of growing up in a bicultural, bilingual community.  

 And the children did not disappoint. As I detail in a later article, "Sociolinguistic 

Contours in the Verbal Art of Chicano Children" (1982), the children I documented in 

Austin exhibited verbal competence and creativity in English, Spanish, and in a creole 

mode of speaking that combines the two languages. It seemed to me that this Spanish-

English creole was, for some of the children, their favored speech variety, and it 

percolated into much of their verbal art performance. For example, I recorded this 

linguistic reshaping of a well-known interrogative routine (I’ve placed the Spanish in 

Italics and added English translation for the Spanish words; see McDowell 1979, 177): 

1st child: Why did the chicken cross the road? ¿Por qué? (Why?) 

2nd child: Porque (because) it’s too far to walk. 

3rd child: Porque está too far pa’ andá(r). (Because it’s too far to walk.) 

 One senses here the children savoring the possibilities inherent in their speech 

competence, rolling different options off their tongues, mixing Spanish and English, as 

they seek the most pleasing formulation, perhaps aware at some level that the fit 

between riddle question and answer wasn’t quite where it needed to be.9 

 Moreover, they could draw on rich verbal art heritages lodged in two world 

civilizations: Anglo American traditions rooted in the British Isles and processed 

through the North American experience; and Spanish American traditions with roots in 

Spain, processed through the Latin American experience, primarily that of Mexico, the 

culture of origin for most of their families. I formulated this competence in my 1982 

article as one featuring both parallel and mixed constructions, that is, verbal products 

that keep the two languages and traditions separate, and those that mix them. 

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Discussing this competence in my 2018 article, where I work with the concept of 

transitionality as endemic to border populations, I conclude that the verbal performance 

of Chicano children reveals that “transitionality entails its dislocations, but when 

circumstances are favorable, it can occasion a doubling of riches” (2018, 98).     

Assessing the functions of children’s play.  

Crossing the triviality barrier (Sutton-Smith 1970) that encourages indifference to 

the things children do, I sought to show that the verbal routines I collected are not only 

diversions or entertainments, which they are, but that they also serve important 

purposes in the life of the child, enabling children to participate successfully in group 

activities and to express themselves artistically in traditional cultural forms and arenas. 

Entering the world of children’s peer play, and seeking to describe it as it actually 

transpires, I came away impressed with the social skills in evidence as the children 

collaborated on their multi-turn performances, and with their inventiveness as they 

brought forward, reprocessed, and repurposed familiar items in their cultural 

repertories. Such was the fluidity of mental operations in this play arena that, when 

Brian Sutton-Smith asked me to write on the transmission of children’s folklore, I used 

materials from the Texas project to write instead about the activation of children’s 

folklore, finding the concept of transmission to be too mechanical to fit the data 

(McDowell 1995).  

 In sum, I came to construe children’s play as a crucial arena of socialization and 

enculturation. Addressing the praxis of the verbal routines I gathered in Austin, I wrote 

in the thesis (1975, 394) that the children learn “that they can tease, rebuke, plea, 

command, inquire, solicit, and insult through any one of these verbal genres, and that 

often the message will be all the more convincing when formulated in one of these 

verbal capsules.” And, construing children ultimately as both ethnographers and 

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tricksters, achieving mastery over cultural resources but also the ability to detect points 

of overlap, inconsistency, and neglect, I wrote, in the thesis, as follows: “Without the 

availability of this informal, generally pleasurable format for interaction, it is difficult 

indeed to imagine that children could acquire and master the range of cognitive, 

linguistic, and practical materials and methods which will eventually carry them into 

adolescent and adult roles” (1975, 395-96).  

Concluding thoughts 

Casting my glance back over the years, I feel fortunate to have participated in the 

Texas project. There was the immediate satisfaction of coming into contact with 

children and their families in Clarksville and East Austin, and my growing fascination 

with the impressive verbal repertoire I was documenting. Additionally, there were 

short-term benefits of considerable importance to me – not the least being that I could 

generate from my field materials the dissertation thesis that would complete my 

doctoral work at the University of Texas. Moreover, the laboratory actually financed the 

typing of my thesis! 

 Looking further down the path, it was valuable to gain this on-the-ground 

experience doing fieldwork in a community; I had previously done only minor bits of 

fieldwork in the course of preparing seminar papers.10 The extended stint in the 

Chicano neighborhoods of Austin, Texas, gave me the opportunity to amass a 

significant body of field data and to ponder its possible meanings and uses. And, as is 

evident in this retrospective account, the materials I collected in Austin have served me 

well over the years as I have continued to be instructed and intrigued by the 

conspicuous verbal expertise of the young Mexican Americans I came to know on the 

streets with Austin’s Chicano kids.  

 

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Appendix: Audio File Compilation 

Story: “Este chamaquito estaba chewing gum” (click for access to audio) 

This performance took place in East Austin on May 11, 1974, among a lively 

group of siblings and friends. My notes indicate a session with “some riddles, then 

stories about talking monkeys (changos) in English and Spanish; next, inter-racial jokes 

favoring the Mexicano; then they sing songs from the current Spanish hit-parade.”  

The storyteller is Raymond, age 5, who insists on telling a story his older brother 

claims to have already told – the performance is remarkable for its code-switching, to 

the point of displaying a Spanish-English creole. Here is my transcription, and 

translation, of Raymond’s performance: 

Este chamaquito, este chamaquito estaba chewing gum, 
(This little boy, this little boy was chewing gum) 

estaba comiendo gum y la estaba chewing  
(he was chewing gum, and he was chewing it) 

y después se le cayó y ya la iba a levantar y dijo la mamita:  
(and then it fell and he was going to pick it up and his mother said) 

"No, no lo agarre porque el diablo ya la lambió," y después dijo,  
("No, don't grab it because the devil already licked it" and then she said) 

 

"Ten, anda a buscar otra," so he chewing it  
("Take this, go and look for another" so he chewing it) 

and this, el vio una big old rock que la mamita, la quería hacer jump la rock y se   
cayó y dijo,  
(and this, he saw a big old rock that his mother, she wanted to jump over the 
rock and she fell and said)  

"Ontá mi nene?" y dijo, "No, porque el diablo ya te lambió."  
("Where's my little boy?" and he said, "No, because the devil already licked you") 

--- 

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Rhyme: “Corrí corrí”  (click for access to audio) 

This rhyme was performed by a lively group, with Ricky, age 10, Angie, age 8, 

and Linda, age 9, in the middle of the action. The scene is East Austin, the date July 17, 

1974.  

“Corrí corrí,” is comical and also slightly risqué, and it evokes a good deal of 

laughter as the children rapidly chant it. Here are the words – the Spanish original, my 

English translation: 

Corrí corrí me tropecé  
(I ran and ran, and then I tripped) 

caí en las lanas de José  
(I fell into the undies of José) 

se las metí, se las saqué 
(I put them on, I took them off)  

tenía pelitos y me asusté 
(they had little hairs and I got scared) 

--- 

Song: “Elena la Ballena” (“Elena the Whale,” click for access to audio) 

This performance (and the next one) took place on May 1, 1974, in the Clarksville 

neighborhood of Austin. Three youngsters, José, age 9, Joanne, age 9, and Tina, age 7, 

are the main players. Leonice Santamaría is assisting. My notes have this synopsis: “Mix 

of Spanish and English. Lots of riddles, rhymes, songs, and games.” 

“Elena la Ballena” is sung entirely in Spanish; here are the words, with my translation: 

Elena Elena    (Elena Elena) 

Elena la ballena   (Elena the whale) 

vivía vivía    (she lived, she lived) 

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vivía en el mar   (she lived in the sea) 

 

En el agua azul   (In the blue water) 

le gustaba jugar   (she liked to play) 

en el agua azul  (in the blue water)  

le gustaba bañar   (she liked to bathe) 

 

Ay mami    (Oh mother) 

que hondo está el agua  (how deep is the water) 

que hondo está el mar (how deep is the sea) 

--- 

Rhyme: “My Sailor” (click for access to audio) 

This rhyme, performed in the May 1, 1974, session in the Clarksville (see above, 

#3), neighborhood with José, Joanne, and Tina, is widely known, and is performed by 

these children to accompany their handclapping.  

Here are the words, in their original English: 

My sailor went to sea sea - sea sea  
to see what he could see see - see see,  
but all that he could see see see - see see,  
was the bottom of the ocean sea sea - sea sea 
 
My sailor went to cha cha-cha cha 
to see what he could cha cha- cha cha,  
but all that he could cha cha- cha cha,  
was the bottom of the ocean cha cha- cha cha.  
 
My sailor went to Chi-na 
to see what he could Chi-na,  
but all that he could Chi-na,  

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was the bottom of the ocean Chi-na.  
 
My sailor went to ooh-wa-chi-ga 
to see what he could ooh-wa-chi-ga,  
but all that he could ooh-wa-chi-ga,  
was the bottom of the ocean ooh-wa-chi-ga. 

--- 

John Holmes McDowell, professor emeritus at Indiana University, works at the confluence of 
language and culture in US and Latin American settings. His research topics range from the 
verbal play of children, in Children’s Riddling (IU Press, 1979); to Mexico’s ballad tradition, 
the corrido, in Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico’s Costa Chica 
(University of Illinois Press, 2000) and ¡Corrido! The Living Ballad of Mexico’s Western 
Coast (University of New Mexico Press, 2015); to the mythic consciousness of Andean peoples, 
in Sayings of the Ancestors: The Spiritual Life of the Sibundoy Indians (1989) and "So 
Wise Were Our Elders": Mythic Narratives of the Kamsá (1994), both published by the 
University Press of Kentucky. Lately, he is collaborating with the Diverse Environmentalisms 
Research Team (DERT) to explore the concept of ecosovereignty, in Performing 
Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change (University of Illinois 
Press, 2021, co-edited with Katey Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy). 

 

 

References cited 

Richard Bauman 2020. “The Texas School.” In Patricia Sawin and Rosemary Levy 
Zumwalt, eds., Folklore in the United States and Canada: An Institutional History. 
Bloomington: Indiana University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16h2ngc.14 

William Labov, 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. 
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 

José Limón, “The Folk Performance of Chicano and the Cultural Limits of Political 
Ideology,” Working Papers in Sociolinguistics 62: 1-28. Southwest Educational 
Development Laboratory: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED198695 

John McDowell, 1972. “Differential Response of the Class and Ethnic Components of 
the Austin Speech Community to Marked Phonological Variables," 

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Anthropological Linguistics 14(6): 228-239. (With Susan McRae). 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/30029325 

_____. 1974. "Some Aspects of Verbal Art in Bolivian Quechua," Folklore Annual 6: 68-81. 
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/25100/SomeAspectsof
VerbalArt.pdf 

_____. 1975. “The Speech Play and Verbal Art of Chicano Children: An Ethnographic 
and Sociolinguistic Study.” University of Texas, Austin. Doctoral Dissertation. 

_____. 1979. Children's Riddling. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

_____. 1982. Sociolinguistic Contours in the Verbal Art of Chicano Children," In Spanish 
in the United States: Sociolinguistic Aspects, Lucia Elias-Olivares and Jon Amaestae 
(ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 333-353. [Also appears in 
Aztlán: Chicano Journal of the Social  Sciences and the Arts 13: 165-193.] 

_____. 1985. "The Poetic Rites of Conversation," Journal of Folklore Research 22(2/3): 
113-132. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3814388   

_____. 1995. "The Transmission of Children's Folklore," in Children's Folklore: A Source 
Book, Brian Sutton-Smith et. al. (ed.). New York: Garland, pp. 49-62.  
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/71/ 

_____. 2018. “Transitionality: The Border as Barrier and Bridge.” In Border Folk 
Balladeers: Critical Studies on Américo Paredes, edited by Roberto Cantú. 
Cambridge Press, pages 86-101. 

McGhee, P.E.. 1976. “Children’s Appreciation of Humor: A Test of the Cognitive 
Congruity Principle,” Child Development 47(2): 420-26. 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1128797 

Piaget, Jean. 1972. The Child and Reality: Problems of Genetic Psychology. New York: 
Viking. 

Shultz, Thomas. 1974. “Development of the Appreciation of Riddles,” Child Development 
45(1): 100-105. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1127755 

Sutton-Smith, Brian. 1970. “Psychology of Childlore: The Triviality Barrier,” Western 
Folklore 29(1): 1-8. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1498679 

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/30029325
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/25100/SomeAspectsofVerbalArt.pdf
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/25100/SomeAspectsofVerbalArt.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3814388
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/71/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1128797
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1127755
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Whitt, Kenneth and Norman Prentice. 1977. “Cognitive Processes in the Development 
of Children’s Enjoyment and Comprehension of Joking Riddles,” Developmental 
Psychology 13(2): 129-36. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0012-1649.13.2.129 

 

 
1 I use Mexican American and Chicano interchangeably here, notwithstanding their connection to two 
different speech registers: Mexican American the more formal, official option; Chicano the more informal, 
colloquial one. See Limón 1979 for a discussion of these ethnonyms. 
2 See Bauman 2020 for a full account of the twists and turns in the road leading to the formation of this 
program. 
3 My partner at the time, Leonice Santamaría, took an interest in this project; she accompanied me on 
visits with children in the Clarksville neighborhood, and assisted with translation questions as these 
arose. 
4 It was Professor Bauman who helped me formulate this excellent title for a thesis. My thesis committee 
was a strong one: Bauman as chair, plus Roger Abrahams, then chair of the English department; Marcia 
Herndon, ethnomusicologist in the Anthropology department; Américo Paredes, who was in English at 
the time; and Brian Stross, in Anthropology. 
5 This collection of essays derives from the 2016 conference themed “Américo Paredes: Border Narratives 
and the Folklore of Greater Mexico,” sponsored by UCLA and California State University, Los Angeles; 
my essay is based on my keynote address at that conference. 
6 Copies of the tapes are stored in the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University (see 
https://iucat.iu.edu/catalog/5735752), and transcriptions of these recordings are stored among my papers 
at the Indiana University Archives: see John H. McDowell papers, Accession 2021/067, Indiana University 
Archives, Bloomington, IN.  
7 Especially memorable is the afternoon I wandered in on a birthday celebration where a conjunto was 
making music – I was invited to join in the festivities, and provided with beer to boot! 
8 I realize this protocol would not fly today, when IRB’s are closely watching research projects involving 
children. Indeed, there is perhaps less easiness now than formerly about strangers interacting with 
children, and I doubt one would find many children at ease in front of their houses, with the rise of 
supervised activity and the interference of computer-mediated entertainment.  
9 The riddle question would have to ask something like, “Why did the chicken fly across the road?” in 
order to sustain the proffered solution.  
10 I note that three of these seminar fieldwork projects resulted in publications: McDowell 1972; McDowell 
1974; and McDowell 1985. I thank professors Brian Stross, Joel Sherzer, and Richard Bauman for 
providing much-appreciated guidance and inspiration.   

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Play and the Performance of Children’s Folklore 
Opportunities for Learning 

 
Beverly J. Stoeltje 

Indiana University, Emeritus 
 

Focusing on a wide range of folklore genres (handclaps, songs, jokes, counting out rhymes, 
circle games) and taboo topics, this study situates the data within a theoretical literature on 
play, performance, ritual, learning, and symbolic anthropology. Children between the ages of 4 
and 10 (female and male) performed the various genres in the early 1970’s in Austin, Texas. The 
research was conducted in conjunction with the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory 
in Austin, Texas, and the Texas Children’s Folklore Project directed by Richard Bauman at the 
University of Texas, Austin. 
 

 Launched in the early 1970’s at the University of Texas (Austin) the Texas 

Children’s Folklore project not only generated new research but aimed to attract the 

attention of educators. As a graduate student in the Folklore Program I enthusiastically 

joined the research team with the encouragement of Dick Bauman and Roger Abrahams 

who were engaged in the field as Dick outlines in his essay. 

In addition to “Bauman and Abrahams,” as they were widely known (or “Dick 

and Roger” to students), were other faculty whose interests had a potential bearing on 

children’s folklore and welcomed our attention. Among those on the Folklore Faculty 

was Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (from whom I took my first folklore course) who 

published an edited volume on speech play with one chapter devoted to the speech 

play of children. 

Doug Foley (Education and Anthropology) regularly taught courses on the 

anthropology of education and welcomed Folklore students. Joel Sherzer—Dick’s close 

colleague in linguistic anthropology - was closely allied with the graduate program in 

Folklore. His interest in speech play featured prominently in his research and in his 

classes. Brian Stross (Anthropology) maintained an interest in children’s speech play 

and encouraged folklore students engaged with any genre of children’s folklore. 

 When Barbara Babcock arrived, she introduced structural symbolic anthropology 

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into the folklore curriculum, including the ideas of Gregory Bateson, Mary Douglas, 

Victor Turner, Jim Fernandez, and French structuralism in the work of Claude Levi-

Strauss, Paul Ricoeur, Guy Debord. Of particular relevance to me in this literature was 

the theme of Play as it related to ritual, festival and carnival. 

 This milieu was saturated with heady theoretical perspectives, ones that 

supported an interest in children’s folklore. Combined with this rich academic 

environment was the SEDL (Southwest Educational Development Laboratory) research 

project (as Dick Bauman has explained in his essay). It provided a fertile empirical 

domain within which to explore children’s performances and assimilate the research to 

a wide range of theory. 

At this same moment in time folklorists in the American Folklore Society were 

engaged in debates concerning whether folklore scholarship should or could be applied 

to settings outside of academe. As the purpose of our research was to provide results 

relevant for educators, our research generated interest among folklorists across the 

country. In Austin we felt that our research had value both within academe and in the 

field of education. 

My research incorporated a wide range of folklore genres in a variety of settings 

recognizable as play. Scholars in separate disciplines were focusing on the relationship 

between play and ritual in these years, identifying the space for play with the liminal 

period in ritual in which creativity and expressivity flourished.1 Erik Erikson linked 

these concepts in his definition of play as playful ritualization (1972:143), and Jean Piaget 

emphasized that learning is based on a process of discovery, construction, and re-

invention (1972: 26-27), a definition equally appropriate for children’s folklore. Further, 

in his now classic article on play, Gregory Bateson introduced the idea of frame, a 

concept especially useful in the study of children’s folklore and widely applicable to 

performance studies. Further, he succinctly argued that in play a child is learning “a 

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conceptual structuring of the universe” in which there are “sorts and categories of 

behavior” (1971, 266).  
 

Children’s Handclaps: Poetic Features and Semantic Concepts  

Children’s handclaps involve the performers in a multiplicity of skills involving 

a wide range of learning. This topic was selected as one that deserved a separate book 

designed for teachers and others who worked with children. That became my project 

for SEDL, an instructional book that would direct teachers to the importance of 

handclaps as informal learning. 

Let me mention my qualifications for this task in addition to the fact that I was a 

graduate student engaged in children’s folklore research. In the 1960’s I taught junior 

high school on the Monterey Peninsula of California, providing me with first-hand 

knowledge of teaching in public schools. Piano lessons (for almost twenty years) 

provided me with the ability to transcribe the handclap tunes. Of even more relevance, 

my research was greatly facilitated by having two informants in residence, my 

daughters Gretchen and Rachael, who were a constant source of rich data and always 

ready to collaborate in my research. They were ages four and seven years and then five 

and eight years, ages when handclaps and other folklore forms were popular play 

activities. They and their friends filled numerous cassettes with their performances. 

The instructional book is titled Children’s Handclaps: Informal Learning in Play. It 

includes twelve texts of handclaps (with cultural variations), suggestions for teachers, 

instructions for participation, drawings of hand positions, the musical scores for the 

tunes, and multiple photos illustrating nineteen children of different ages, ethnicity, and 

gender plus one teacher, all engaged in “doing handclaps.” A statement on handclaps 

as artistic communication and cultural variation, and its relevance for learning, 

concludes the book. 

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Handclaps involve hand/eye coordination and coordination with another person. 

They also integrate a musical tune, rhythm, rhyme, repetition, word substitution, and 

nonsense, all of which constitute speech play. While the tune and rhythm and certain 

words will remain the same throughout a specific song, other words will change as the 

song moves from one verse to another, moving the action along. Poetic features 

coordinate concepts, plot, rhyme, tunes, and movement in forms of speech play by 

means of integrating the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic; in other words, the 

principle of combination/contiguity and the principle of selection/substitution 

coordinate to create the poetic form. “When Sally Was a Baby” repeats a sentence (the 

combination of words into a sentence), but Sally’s identity is a substitution in the 

sentence as she grows up, finally becoming a skeleton, illustrating the life cycle with 

words and movements. 

           Verse              Motion 
When Sally was a baby, a baby, a baby   thumb sucking motion 
When Sally was a baby, she went like this    
Ummmm, this-a-way, ummmm, that-a-way.    OR: She went like this:  
Ummmm this-a-way, one, two, three.           ooo, aah, cha, cha, cha 
 
When Sally was a schoolgirl, she went like this:  
Two plus two is four, four plus four is eight, 
     eight plus eights is sixteen, 
     sixteen plus sixteen is thirty-two 
When Sally was a teen-ager, she went like this…  talks on phone or slaps knees 
When Sally was a wife…..     kissing and hugging motion 
When Sally was a mother…..     rocking baby motion 
When Sally was a grandmother…..    bent over with aching back 
When Sally’s husband died…..    hands over face 
When Sally was a skeleton…..    shake arms loosely 

 

In the following handclap, “Tiny Tim,” the nonsense sentences serve to emphasize 

rhyme and rhythm as well as sequence and repetition.  

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Miss Lucy had a baby, she named him Tiny Tim. 
She put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim. 
 
He drank up all the water, he ate up all the soap. 
He tried to swallow the bathtub, but it wouldn’t go down his throat. 
 
Miss Lucy called the doctor, Miss Lucy called the nurse. 
Miss Lucy called the lady with the alligator purse. 
 
In walked the doctor, in walked the nurse.  
In walked the lady with the alligator pure. 
 

Out walked the doctor, out walked the nurse. 
Out walked the lady with the alligator purse. 
 

 Not all handclaps have a linear, sequential message, or a “plot,” but each 

handclap selects from the repertoire of ideas and concepts available to children and 

combines them with poetic features, including nonsense words or phrases, so that the 

song and the clapping express the rhythm. The performers are increasing their motor 

skills through hand/eye coordination and their musical ability by carrying a tune. Not 

to be overlooked, in the clapping a child is learning cooperation and coordination with 

another child. Bateson’s definition of play (above) is especially cogent for handclaps - 

that they are not learning separate concepts but skills, knowledge, and semantic 

categories, the conceptual structuring of the universe. 

Though my major responsibility for the project was the production of the 

Handclap book, I also visited a Navajo elementary school in Crown Point, New Mexico. 

It was a school that had been shifted from BIA administration to the tribe itself. I know 

that my review was very positive as the school was running smoothly, and children 

were very comfortable being interviewed by me in English. The strongest image I came 

away with was the children’s artwork, posted on the walls of classrooms. One drawing 

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depicted in the child’s own words a “Squaw Dance where people are having a good 

time. The women are trying to cook some foods, also Sharlinda’s family were there to 

help.”  Above the scene with the women cooking and Sharlinda’s family were cars 

flying through the sky in the traditional Navajo pattern, an arc. Instead of horses flying 

across the sky, the young artist, Melvin Chee, had incorporated modernity in the form 

of cars, the more common mode of transportation in the 20th century. 

Publicity and Continuity 

Our team was not tasked with publicity and distribution, and we did not receive 

data from SEDL. However, through folklore channels we were aware that news of the 

book went out and requests for copies arrived. In one example, a four-page excerpt 

from the Handclap book appeared in the Winter of 1979 newsletter of the Children’s 

Folklore Section. Further notices announced it in the American Folklore Newsletter and 

in the student newsletter of Indiana University. At KLRN-TV, Austin, a teacher’s guide 

was produced entitled, CABOODLE, which used some of the Children’s Handclaps 

material. In their newsletter The Center for Southern Folklore wrote an article that 

included material from the Handclap book, and the editors replied to Stoeltje, “We feel 

what you have to say about handclaps fills a much-needed link in presenting a well-

rounded picture of children’s folklore to our audience…”. Also, Lillian Krelove of 

Legacy Books sold copies of the book, and numerous folklorists requested copies 

through those of us at the University. On our recommendation, letters and copies of the 

book were sent as well to specific scholars, and announcements went out to colleagues 

in fields related to Education.   

 A second body of research from the Children’s Folklore project published by 

SEDL focused on ring games performed by African American girls: Black Girls at Play: 

Folkloric Perspectives on Child Development. This publication featured two articles 

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describing and analyzing traditional ring games that Black girls played on school 

playgrounds. Margaret Brady’s article, “This Little Lady’s Gonna Boogaloo,” 

emphasized the importance of peer group support, demonstrated in performance 

(through coaching) or in the case of hurt feelings or preventing someone from falling off 

the merry-go-round. Noting Jean Piaget’s attention to this element she references his 

comment that social collaboration is an essential factor in intellectual development 

(1964, 4). Rosalind Eckhardt, the author of “From Handclap to Line Play,” documented 

handclaps in circles of children - as many as ten. Her essay included 24 photos of girls 

(and boys) playing ring games and line games in which one girl performs in the center 

or through two lines of other players. Eckhardt elucidates the proxemic structure of 

these games and notes the increasing complexity of the games in children ages eight 

and nine. Both the Children’s Handclaps instructional book and the Black Girls at Play 

publications are held in libraries throughout the country.2 

Perhaps the most important means of communicating information related to the 

Texas Children’s Folklore Project rested on the shoulders of the participants in the 

project. One example was the symposium on Informal Learning of Children chaired by 

Brian Sutton-Smith in 1976 at the annual meeting of the A.E.R.A. (American 

Educational Research Association) in San Francisco. Included in the presentations were 

ones by Richard Bauman and Bob Randall of SEDL. Significantly, as the team members 

gathered data, we also gave papers at the annual meetings of the American Folklore 

Society and began publishing articles based on the research. 

Dissemination of the research has been ongoing, however, through teaching. For 

those several of us who went on to become professors at various universities, teaching 

presented an opportunity to present the research in folklore classes. While teaching in 

the English Department at the University of Texas, I included children’s folklore in my 

classes, and again at Indiana University where I taught large folklore classes and was 

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assisted by graduate students in the Folklore and Ethnomusicology Department. Not 

only could the undergraduate students relate to children’s folklore, but the graduate 

student assistants incorporated it in their classes when they began teaching at other 

universities. One of our team, Margaret Brady, who published her dissertation on 

Navajo children’s skin walker stories, taught throughout her career at the University of 

Utah where she included children’s folklore in her classes. (See John McDowell’s article 

in this issue for his publication and teaching.) 

An Ethnographer’s Observations 

Johann Huizinga considered that “…one of the most important characteristics of 

play was its spatial separation from ordinary life” (1970, 19-20). As research confirmed, 

children perform a wide range of folklore genres in settings that are unstructured, 

removed from routine activities. Sites where children perform comfortably include 

school playgrounds, neighborhood yards and homes, car trips, mealtimes and more. 

The “separation” need not be measured in distance but rather the children must feel 

that no adult nor adult rules are governing the play space or will intervene in the play--

though an adult may be present or in proximal space. 

For example, my research included lunch time in a school cafeteria; though 

teachers were present in the room, they were not sitting with or monitoring the 

children. Like playgrounds, lunch time was separated from the authority and routines 

of the classroom; it brought friends together in a child only space which they 

transformed into a performance opportunity. 

In addition to school lunch as a research site, I collected performances of 

children’s folklore on school playgrounds, in after school play groups, in the car, at 

mealtime, in my own home and wherever children were at play. Consequently, my 

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research captured a wide variety of children’s folklore performances, filling 16 cassette 

tapes. 

While some scholars and educators have recognized the importance of social 

collaboration and/or group solidarity for learning (Piaget argued that ”social 

collaboration….leads to a critical frame of mind where children must communicate with 

each other” [1964, 4]), it depends on familiarity or an environment in which familiarity 

can develop. Folklore performance flourishes when groups of children interact 

frequently over time. Interaction creates familiarity with performance forms and trust 

among the participants, ultimately building confidence among the group members. 

Consequently, children will organize themselves in performance more quickly and 

sustain their play longer when they frequently play together in contrast to children who 

are not familiar with each other. 

Placing the focus on specific performances reveals significant individual 

behavior as well as that of groups, small and large. Leadership roles, clown behavior, 

competitive and/or cooperative relationships, skills and talents such as knowledge of 

jokes, songs, and handclaps or the ability to perform exceptionally well, or, 

alternatively, the lack of ability to perform or the source of disruption – all of these can 

be observed as children perform handclaps, ring games, and more. An especially 

important interaction involving specific individuals is that between more experienced 

performers (either because of age or experience) and newcomers or younger ones. The 

experienced member of a group will often assist a novice or contribute a new item to 

perform; however, taking advantage of their expertise, some experienced individuals 

will manipulate the folklore form to their advantage.  

Though rarely mentioned in collections, the identity of the field worker – how it 

can be exploited to good advantage or be an obstacle to overcome – bears consideration 

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in conducting research. Whether an individual has language facility, familiarity with 

children and schools, knowledge of folklore forms, access to children, and other 

relevant features such as cultural identity and gender, can influence the success of the 

research. 

The examples below from my research illustrate the effects of familiarity, the 

wide range of folklore the children possessed, and the significance of documenting 

specific performances. I have noted the relevance of poetic features, the manipulation of 

the semantic categories that constitute the effort at a conceptual structuring of the 

universe, the variety of roles children can assume, and the social interactions that are 

encapsulated in a performance of children’s folklore. These examples include a 

counting out rhyme, a circle game, a short verse, and songs and jokes. 

Manipulation and Resistance: Eenie Meenie, Minnie, Moe or “Counting Me” 

In the following counting out rhyme, “Eenie, Meenie, Minnie, Moe,” (click for 

access to audio) five girls, ages 4 to 10 years, are in my living room participating in the 

counting out rhyme. Four of the five girls live on the same block and play together 

frequently; the fifth and oldest girl plays with the group when she is visiting her 

grandmother but attends a different school.  

 My tape recorder and I were familiar to these children because I frequently 

recorded their play, and one of them especially enjoyed hearing herself on the tape. On 

the day I recorded the “Counting Me” incident I was sitting at the kitchen table, and the 

children were close by in the next room, and the tape recorder was running. Suzy is the 

4 year old, and Karen is the10 year old. 

 

 

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I hear the finish of the counting out rhyme and suddenly several voices at once 

were screaming:  

“You are it!”  

 “Suzy did it.”  

“Gina did it.”  

“Quit it, Suzy, Quit it!!!!” 

“Come on…let’s go tell, Gina.”  

The girls come rushing into the kitchen, accompanied by Suzy.   

Gina: “Mommy, Suzy’s been spittin’ all over the table and everything.” 

Mommy to Suzy: “Why were you doing that?” 

Suzy replies: “Cause, they were counting me, and I didn’t like it.” 

Mommy to Suzy: “They were counting you? What does that mean?” 

Suzy: “they…” (pause) 

Karen to Mommy: “We were going Eenie, Meenie, Minie, Moe, and we knew it 
was her, and everybody knows, and…it even landed on her, so we said it was 
her. Now, she keeps on fussing.” 

Mommy to Karen: “Come, show me how you do it.” 

Suzy screams: “I’m not it. I’m not it!” 

Karen to Mommy: “Eenie, Meenie, Minie, Moe, Catch a fella by the toe, If he 
hollers, let him go. Eenie, Meenie, Minie, Moe. My mother told me to pick this 
very one - so you are it. See – it landed on her some way.” 

Mommy to Karen: “How did it turn out for her to be it?” 

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Karen to Mommy: “See, Gina, when it landed on her she started pointing at 
Suzy. Suzy started kicking then and got people’s pants all dirty, and then Lucy 
wiped it back on her, and then she got the chair and tried to get Lucy – and that 
wouldn’t work.” 

Karen to Mommy: “Look, she’s it… EENIE, MEENIE, MINIE, MOE - see, it 
always lands on her.” 

Mommy to Karen: “Does it have anything to do with who you want it to land 
on?” 

Karen answers: “NOoooo, Yesss. Well, see, this is really the way it goes—see, I 
told Lucy she might lose a $5.00 bill, you know, so I told Gina, ‘Gina, take this $5 
bill and keep it’ (pause). I told Lucy, ‘Lemme see that $5 bill,’ and she goes 
(pause), and everybody starts runnin’on Suzy.” 

Mommy to Karen: “This is how you decided it was Suzy?” 

Karen answers: “I didn’t – she did.” 

Mommy to Karen: “You said, ‘Eenie, Meenie, Mini, Moe’ to decide who took the 
$5 bill?” 

Karen: “Yeah, and it always landed on her, see.” 

Suzy: “I wasn’t IT!!!” 

 In this case Karen, who was three years older than several of the girls and five 

years older than Suzy, was managing the counting out rhyme and planted the $5 bill 

that was the object of this rhyme on Gina. (She gave it to her and told her to keep it). 

(She obtained the $5 bill from Lucy). She manipulated EMMM so that it landed on Gina, 

but Gina understood that she was to be judged the one with the $5 bill so she pointed to 

her younger sister (Suzy), and Karen agreed to the move and claimed that it landed on 

Suzy, the 4 year old who was not sure what this was all about, but was quite certain 

that she had been identified as “it” - the one guilty of something. Being much younger, 

she opted to act out in resistance and began kicking and spitting on the others, 

disrupting the game and bringing it to an end. 

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 Peace was restored once Karen explained her strategy to me. (The manipulation 

of counting out rhymes seems to be a common occurrence among children.) 

Punchinella: A Rich Opportunity 

A circle game popular with African American girls, Punchinella, names the 

individual in the center of the circle who demonstrates a movement that all in the circle 

must repeat while singing the verses of the song. The movement is coordinated with 

hand clapping and the words and tune of the song. When all the verses are completed, 

the child in the center chooses one from the circle to become Punchinella, and the song is 

repeated with a new movement. Though the game is frequently performed, in each 

instance variations are enacted. The game and specific performances are also described 

in Brady and in Eckhardt (Brady 1975 and Eckhardt 1975). 

 The performance I observed (click for access to audio) took place on the 

playground of an integrated elementary school in Austin. African American girls 

created a circle and began the game. At a certain point in the game, a white girl walked 

up to one of the black girls in the circle and requested to join; permission was granted 

and a handclasp was broken to permit her to enter the circle, and the game continued 

smoothly. 

Another variation in this particular game was the action of two boys who played 

a distinct role. Previous to Punchinella one of the boys was engaged in chasing one of the 

girls (who had initiated the chase game). Once she organized Punchinella he continued 

to focus on her, pushing her, running across the circle and other disruptive moves. At 

times one player would yell to him to get out of the way, and another player yelled to 

others not to hit him in the back. He played the role of the clown, refusing to join in the 

game, violating the rules, but as he was juxtaposed against the structure of the game, he 

was generating energy, and sustaining the “chase relationship” with the leader of the 

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group. Another boy participated in the game, performing the movements to perfection 

and urging others to shape up the circle and get the game moving by uttering the 

phrase, “Get by your Honey.” The variations/violations and the instructions created by 

the two male figures provided a clown figure to create anti-structure and an artist who 

represented structure, the effort to move the game along smoothly. The two seemed to 

be friends and tolerated each other comfortably. The girls seemed to enjoy the two boys, 

and the game continued for many rounds, suggesting that the energy the boys provided 

prolonged the game by introducing these innovations. 

Performing the circle game is itself an example of social collaboration, but it also 

provides the opportunity for individuals to perform before a responsive audience; 

equally important, each one of the players experiences a turn in the center of the circle. 

In this example the two boys draw attention not only to themselves but to the girls’ 

ability to tolerate the disruptions caused by the clown and the instructions issued by the 

artist. 

Poetics and Performance Matters 

My daughters and I moved to student housing where they had new playmates. 

Pablo and Julio, who were from Nicaragua, were the ages of my children and we car-

pooled every morning to school, and sometimes they played in the afternoon. One 

evening they joined my girls and me for dinner when the following performance took 

place (click to access audio). Gina is finishing her dinner and begins a verse, keeping 

time with her feet: 

Beans Beans…” 
The more ya eat, the more ya toot: 
The more ya toot, the better ya feel; 
So eat your beans at ev-ry meal. 

 

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However, Pablo is not satisfied with her performance and issues a correction. The 

emphasis in the last line should not be on every, but on meal. 

“That’s NOT at every meal, but at every meal.”  

As Pablo points out, the poetic function in this brief verse requires that emphasis be 

placed on meal to emphasize the rhyme with feel. Gina then repeats the verse with the 

correction. 

The children then have ice cream and discuss school activities. At that point I ask 

Gina where she learned the verse, and Pablo volunteers that he taught it to her, having 

learned it from a friend of his who goes to a different school. Being the source of the 

verse endows him with authority to correct the emphasis. Throughout dessert Gina 

continues to play with the verse, speeding and slowing the rhythm, exaggerating the 

speech with a Texas accent and speaking the lines of the verse separately – all in an 

effort to try out various poetic features.  

Taboo as Rearranging the Categories 

Children from k-6th grade are characteristically curious about and learning from 

multiple sources about sex, bodies, authority, violence, animals, insects, and other 

topics, some of which may be considered taboo for children. Aware of topics that are 

taboo, some children delight in performing genres of folklore that articulate those topics 

as they elicit squeals and laughter from the other children and encourage further 

attempts to bring bodily topics into their verbal play. These efforts constitute semantic 

categories which the children are exploring.  

As I reflect on my fieldwork in relation to the SEDL charter for the project, what 

comes vividly to mind is the material that fell outside their ideological comfort zone – 

those categories considered taboo. A small group of children, female and male, who 

were friends in and out of school provided a very rich body of taboo material for me, 

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most of which is characteristic of children 6-10 years of age. My two children were 

members of this group and occasionally spent time with Phillip and Chris outside of the 

group interactions - when one of us parents would take them to a movie, for example. 

This material was fascinating to consider as it related to my intellectual interests 

in ritual, festival, and symbolic anthropology (as mentioned above). A major figure in 

this field, Mary Douglas, addressed these semantic categories as they occur in the 

marginal/liminal period of ritual, “the segregation of the body from society.” She wrote 

with targeted insight that “…inhabitants there are licensed to participate in asocial 

behavior. Dirt, obscenity and lawlessness obtain…” (1966, 117). Moreover, “The orifices 

of the body are then the vulnerable points of the body, and what issues from them is 

marginal –spittle, blood, milk, urine, feces or tears… In this theory, the body mirrors the 

social situation, therefore the power of particular bodily margins is determined by the 

situation being mirrored.” (1966, 145) 

Like the inhabitants of the marginal described by Mary Douglas, members of this 

children’s group frequently performed jokes and songs concerned with sex, bodies and 

body parts, death, school authorities and repulsive items such as gopher guts. Because 

the core group of children socialized often, they were familiar with each other and with 

the jokes and songs. Their ages ranged between 5 and 9 years. 

Individual behavior was prominent in the group as Phillip (eight years) focused 

on the taboo and grotesque, assuming the role of a clown. He dominated the play but 

his performance stimulated others to perform as well.  As he liked to hear himself on 

the tape recorder, he was eager to perform in the hopes of hearing the playback. His 

brother, Chris (nine years), did not appreciate his performances and responded with 

verbal skill. Most of their songs have been documented in collections of children’s 

folklore.3  

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Verse & Jokes 

At lunch in the school cafeteria Phillip volunteers when he sees my tape 

recorder, telling me that the following is really a song: 

   I’m a twenty-foot geenie,  
   With a thousand-foot weenie, 
   And I showed it to the lady next door. 
   She thought it was a snake  
   So, she hit it with a rake. 
   Now my weenie’s only 5 foot 4. 
 
The after-school play group included several of the same children who sat 

together at lunch in the school cafeteria. A popular joke in the after-school group deals 

with the body and the discovery of sexuality: 

Sally and Tommy were playing together, and Tommy says, “Sally can I play with 
your belly button?” and Sally says “sure.” So he starts playing with her belly 
button. Sally says, “Tommeee, that’s not my belly button.” And he says, “that’s 
not my finger either.” 
 

Another joke introduces a violation of the teacher/student relationship; the teacher 

initiates the action with an unwilling (at first) child. 

“Ok,” the teacher says, and “ok, it’s time to go home; everybody go home 
except,” I don’t know his name.  

After everyone left, the teacher said, “John, take off my shoes,” and he says, “I 
don’t want to,” and she said, “John,” and he said “ok.”  

And she said, “John, take off my dress,” and he said, “I don’t want to,” and she 
said, “John,” and he said “ok.” (giggles)  

And finally he undressed her all, and she laid down on the table, and she said, 
“John, get on top of me” (giggles) and he said, “I don’t want to,” and she said, 
“John,” and he said, “ok,” and he gets on her, and then the janitor walks in, and 
in a few minutes says “John, get off that teacher,” and he says, “I don’t want to.” 

 

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Songs & Inversion of Instructions 

Glory, glory hallelujah, teacher hit me with the ruler;  
I hit her in the weene with a rotten tangerine, and she ain’t my teacher no more. 
 

More verses followed.  

In the following example five children of the same group as above are recorded 

and observed as we go to a pizzeria for dinner and then to an ice cream shop for 

dessert. As we are driving to the ice cream shop, I remind the children of good behavior 

because on a previous trip Phillip broke his dish and spilled the ice cream. 

Phillip responds: “We’ll remember – I’ll go over the rules. Throw ice cream at 

each other. Break up spoons. Don’t eat the ice cream. If you do not like it, throw it at 

somebody. And those glass cups, remember break them on your way out. Those are the 

ground rules. Do them all.”  

Phillip’s brother Chris replies, “Phillip, you want to know something? If pooh 

came out of your rear end every time you said a word, your pants would be too heavy 

for you to wear, and it would be impossible to clean up.”  

 These comments lead to a discussion of diarrhea with all children talking at once, 

and Gina states that Phillip’s diarrhea comes out of his hair. We arrive at the ice cream 

shop, and everyone enjoys their ice cream with no accidents. Once in the car, the 

children sing one of their favorite songs: 

Have you ever seen a hearse go by, with people in it about to die. 
They wrap you up in a bloody sheet and drop you down about sixty feet. 
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play 
    penuchle on your snout. 
They eat your eyes, they eat your nose, they eat the jelly between 
    your toes. Then all the lizards crawl through your gizzards. 
 

When finished they move on to another favorite song: “Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts.” 

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 Throughout the performance of these examples and many more, Phillip assumed 

the role of clown, reversing rules and relationships, crossing conceptual wires of the 

real and imaginative, and inverting concepts and categories. Others in the group 

participated when they had a taboo form to contribute. The group enthusiastically sang 

the songs carefully constructed with poetic features which nevertheless expressed 

grotesque images. 

Like the inhabitants of the marginal described by Mary Douglas the children are 

marginal to mainstream adult society and when at play are “licensed” to articulate the 

obscene, agonistic, inversive, scatological – all beyond the pale of mainstream 

educational principles and pedagogy. These performances occurred during play time 

and can be accurately described by Babcock who argued that the “play dimension – the 

re-arranging of semantic categories…” (914) was not simply chaos, but …whether it be 

the game of a child, the art of a clown or the play of the novelist –[it] is an ensemble of rules for 

the manipulation and transformation of the various semiotic systems which constitute a given 

culture.” (Babcock, 921).  

Children’s Folklore: Play and Performance 

As the above examples demonstrate, play and the performance of children’s 

folklore create a wide range of informal learning. Not limited to adding skills and 

knowledge, informal learning also creates opportunities for subtracting and refining, 

classifying and rearranging, creating reflection on and refinement of semiotic systems – 

the fundamental material of culture. 

Concerned with informal learning, the Children’s Folklore project motivated a 

great deal more research concerned with children’s performance than the products 

published by SEDL. Had the potential of the project been fulfilled, more publications 

would have been produced out of the research, and person to person contacts with 

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teachers and school administrators could have been pursued to explore further 

developments and application of the research material. 

While the concept of informal learning would seem to be attractive to educators, 

expanding the topic into a larger document addressing concepts such as Play, Language, 

Social Collaboration, Creativity, Substitution, would have been valuable for teachers. 

Another approach would have involved breaking down the material into smaller units, 

suggesting how it could be used as an illustration, integrated into a day in which 

numbers or language or some other formal learning were on the agenda.  

 Finally, an essay on Children’s Performance of Folklore would have been a 

valuable contribution, emphasizing that an individual has the opportunity to try out 

roles, to perform before a friendly audience, to express self-assertion or resistance, to 

demonstrate artistry and to practice social skills when performing in play. These 

opportunities assist children to develop self-esteem, discover talents, build friendships, 

social awareness, group solidarity, and finally, to conclude what to keep and what to 

discard.  

 The Children’s Folklore project was well situated to send a message, and perhaps 

did succeed in doing so, confirming that the performance of children’s folklore showed 

in impressive ways what children were interested in and what they were capable of, 

intellectually, interactionally, aesthetically, morally. 

 

Beverly J. Stoeltje is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, at 
Indiana University.  Her research has concentrated on gender, ritual and festival, performance, 
traditional authorities and legal anthropology.  Her research topics include the American West 
and Rodeo as Performance; Gender and Representation; Queenmothers in Ghana. Among her 
publications are Children’s Handclaps (1978) and Beauty Queens on the Global Stage 
(with R. Wilk and C. B. Cohen) (1996); she has served as editor of special issues of the Journal 
of Folklore Research and Africa Today with articles in the Journal of American 

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Folklore, the Research Review (Ghana) and chapters in multiple volumes. Her current 
research is focused on the Ashanti people of Ghana, with special attention to Queen Mothers and 
chieftaincy disputes.  

 

Acknowledgements 

Beverly Stoeltje would like to acknowledge the major role her daughters, Gretchen Stoeltje and 
Rachael Stoeltje, played in her research. They were engaged, even enthusiastic, about the project, 
the boundary between spontaneous and requested performance being quite fluid. Their names 
were changed in the Counting-Out performance write-up to Gina and Suzy. 

 

References Cited 

Abrahams, Roger D. 1969. Jump Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary. Austin: University of Texas 
Press.  

Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara. 1974. “The Novel and the Carnival World: An Essay in        
Memory of Joe Doherty.” Modern Language Notes. 89: 911-937. 
https://doi.org/10.2307/2906942 

Bateson, Gregory. 1971. “The Message ‘This Is Play,’” in Child’s Play, edited by R.E. 
Herron an Brian Sutton-Smith, 261-69. New York: John Wiley and Sons. 

Brady, Margaret. 1975. “This Little Lady’s Gonna Boogaloo,” in Black Girls At Play: 
Folkloric Perspectives on Child Development, edited by M. Brady and E. Rosalind, 1-
51. Austin: Southwest Educational Development Corporation. 

_____. 1984. “Some Kind of Power”: Navajo Children Skinwalker Narratives. Salt Lake City: 
University of Utah Press. 

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. New York: Penguin.  

Eckhardt, Rosalind. 1975. “From Handclap to Line Play,” in Black Girls at Play: Folkloric 
Perspectives on Child Development, edited by E. Rosalind and M. Brady, 52-101. 
Austin: Southwest Educational Development Corporation.  

Erikson, Erik. 1972. “Play and Actuality,” in Play and Development, edited by Maria W. 
Piers, 127-68. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.  

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Huizinga, Johan. 1970 [1950]. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. New 
York: Beacon Press. 

Piaget, Jean. 1964. "Cognitive Development in Children." Journal of Research in Science 
Teaching. 2(2): 176-186.  

_____. 1972. “Some Aspects of Operations,” in Play and Development, edited by Maria W. 
Piers, 15-27. W.W. Norton & Co. 

Stoeltje, Beverly J. 1978. Children’s Handclaps: Informal Learning in Play. Austin: 
Southwest Educational Development Corporation. 

Turner, Victor. 1974. “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in 
Comparative Symbology.” The Anthropological Study of Human Play. 60(3): 53-92. 

 
1 See Victor Turner (1974). 
2 A further note: NYU published a book in 2020 entitled The Games Black Girls Play by ethnomusicologist 
Kyra Gaunt. It employs a different perspective from the Brady and Eckhardt essays, but references “Black 
Girls at Play,” suggesting that the author might have been inspired by their publication. 
3 See, for example, Roger Abrahams (1969). 

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Part II  
 

Revisiting Three Previously Published 
TCFP Works 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 



 



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Ethnography of Children’s Folklore  
 

Richard Bauman 
Indiana University, Emeritus 

 
First presented in 1978 at the Colloquium on Ethnography and Education, which was hosted by 
Research for Better Schools, Inc. and the University of Pennsylvania, Bauman’s “Ethnography 
of Children’s Folklore” was also printed in Children In and Out of School: Ethnography and 
Education in 1982. Thank you to the Center for Applied Linguistics for permission to reprint in 
this Special Issue of Children’s Folklore Review.  
 
Via an examination of children’s folklore—including riddles, jokes, catches, and solicitational 
routines—Bauman’s article makes strong claims for the importance of ethnographic study of 
children’s folklore as a source of insight into the rich artistic, expressive competencies too 
frequently ignored by educators.   
 

I am especially pleased to have the opportunity to address the subject of 

children's folklore within the context of ethnography and education. For nearly twelve 

years now, I have been hawking children's folklore to educators in one for(u)m or 

another, more often than not in conferences or workshops organized in terms of 

conceptions of children's expressive behavior and/or of research generally in varying 

degrees out of phase with my own. But not this time. Ethnography is exactly what I 

believe in and try to do, and I am convinced that a self-conscious consideration of what 

is distinctive about ethnography and children's folklore can highlight some important 

matters that otherwise tend to remain obscured. 

Let me begin by specifying what I mean by children's folklore, namely, the 

traditional formalized play activities of children, including forms of speech play and 

verbal art, that are engaged in and maintained by the children themselves, within the 

peer group. Familiar genres of children’s folklore include riddles, games, jokes, taunts, 

retorts, hand-claps, counting-out rhymes, catches, ring plays, and jump-rope rhymes, 

and several dozen others that most of you can probably remember as well as I can. 

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Children's folklore is distinguished on the one hand from nursery lore, such as nursery 

rhymes, finger plays, knee-bouncing rhymes, tickling rhymes, and other routines that 

have their locus in the interaction between very young children and adults. It is likewise 

distinguished from, though it may share items and genres and have other continuities 

with, adult folklore. 
 

Ethnographic Studies of Play and Children’s Folklore 

Anthropological students of childhood will be familiar with a whole range of 

what are generally identified in the literature as ethnographic studies of children's play, 

either full-length ethnographies, or more often parts of ethnographies conceived in 

broader terms. Characteristic of these studies, the feature that earns them the 

designation ethnographic, is the consideration of children's play within the context of 

and functionally integrated with larger social and cultural systems. Most often, as 

pointed out by Helen Schwartzman in her review of the literature on anthropological 

studies of children's play (1976), these studies view children's play as an enculturation 

vehicle. The children are seen as proto-adults, learning things and acquiring 

competencies through play that will equip them for later, more mature stages of life 

beyond childhood. The view is a teleological one, taking children as incomplete, as yet 

unfinished bearers of adult culture, helped along toward adulthood by their play 

activities. Schwartzman (1976:298) quotes a nice example of the genre from Colin 

Turnbull's (1961) description of the play of Mbuti Pygmy children: 

Like children everywhere, Pygmy children love to imitate their adult idols...at an early 

age boys and girls are 'playing house' or 'playing hunting.'... And one day they find that 

the games they have been playing are not games any longer, but the real thing for they 

have become adults. 

This perspective, characteristic also of many psychological treatments of 

children's play, tends to be attractive to educators, because education tends 

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overwhelmingly to be conceived—by educators and laymen alike in our society—as 

preparing children for, and moving them along toward, adulthood. At its best, the 

approach can be useful, for one of the universal facts about children is that they do 

indeed become adults, and moreover, because they do in fact operate to a significant 

extent in the world of adults. 

Unfortunately, however, research on children's folklore with an eye toward 

enculturation and toward the potential application of childlore to education tends to be 

seriously skewed by the widespread underlying attitude toward play that it has to be 

useful in a moral sense, that it should contribute toward 'proper' and 'productive' adult 

ways of behaving. Thus, I have found in my own work with educators that my research 

was impelled toward the investigation of language skills in children's speech play and 

verbal art that are clearly implicated in reading proficiency, or of reasoning skills that 

contribute to mathematical or scientific proficiency. The tendency is to reduce the 

playful, whimsical, artful aspects of children's folklore to the merely instrumental, and 

to shun entirely the aggressive, obscene, scatological, anti-authoritarian, and inversive 

elements (e.g., Glory, glory, hallelujah! Teacher hit me with a ruler ...) that any student 

of children's folklore knows well to be a central part of the expressive culture of 

childhood. 

It would certainly be ill-advised to argue against the appropriateness of 

excluding these latter elements from the classroom, and I don't propose to do so. But 

what role should they play in research on children's folklore? Should they be excluded 

from educationally sponsored research as well? 

I'll return to this issue shortly, but first I want to establish a broader point, 

relevant to it, but stated so as to be more directly relevant to the matter of ethnography. 

What I want to do is point up a basic paradox implicit in the kind of ethnographic 

studies of children's play as enculturation that I was discussing a moment ago. One of 

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the most fundamental commitments of ethnography, really a basic ideological principle, 

is to the necessity of accounting for the realities of a culture in its own terms, free of the 

bias inherent in the imposition of frames of reference, or functional imperatives, or a 

priori moral judgments from without. Anthropologists have a name for the violation of 

this principle, namely, ethnocentrism, and they view it as a cardinal sin. 

But let us consider an anthropological study of children's folklore as it functions 

in the enculturation process in a particular culture that is carried out by the best 

relativist standards, and is innocent of any taint of ethnocentrism vis-a-vis that culture 

at large. Remember here, though, that children's folklore is uniquely the expression of 

children in the peer group, and the peer group, although situated within the society as a 

whole, undeniably has its own social structure, and, I would argue, its own distinctive 

culture. Perhaps subculture would be a better term, but in either case, a way of life and 

a way of perceiving, comprehending, and operating in a world that is not the same as 

that of adult members of the society. 

What we are faced with, then, in viewing children's folklore by adult standards 

and imperatives, is something very much akin to ethnocentrism, perhaps adultocentrism, 

if you will permit. This may be an inescapable consequence of the fact that children are 

indeed in transit to adulthood, as I mentioned earlier, and of the quite legitimate 

interest and concern that adults--whether anthropologists, educators, or laymen—have 

in the process and its outcome. I want to use this occasion to argue, though, for the need 

to provide a counterbalance to this adultocentrism by turning our ethnographic lens on 

the peer group and its lore in its own terms, precisely in the manner that we undertake 

our ethnographic investigations of other cultural systems. Moreover, I would argue as 

well that this ethnographic focus on the peer group of children should logically precede 

the study of children's folklore as a mechanism of enculturation for adulthood, and still 

further that investigation of this kind has its own special usefulness for educators. 

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To describe the kind of study I am advocating for children's folklore, I will need 

to say something about what ethnography has come to mean in folklore research 

generally. For most of the history of folklore as a scholarly discipline the basic unit of 

analysis has been the folkloric text, the item of folklore, sometimes in relation to other 

versions of that item in historical or distributional perspective, sometimes in relation to 

other texts to which it bears a generic relationship, sometimes in relation to other 

aspects of society or culture, or even individual biography or personality, but 

overwhelmingly with a sense of folklore as isolatable stuff, like a pot or an axe or an 

arrowhead, with its essence somehow identifiable in its formal structure and content 

alone. More recently, however, there has been an increasing interest in folklore as 

situated communication, for the place and uses of folklore in the conduct of social life 

and the competence that underlies this use. (By competence, I mean the knowledge and 

ability to operate appropriately in a socially constituted and culturally defined world 

[Hymes 1971a]). This study of the patterns and functions of folklore as situated 

communication, rendered meaningful in terms of endogenously determined contexts of 

use, is what I mean by the ethnographic approach to folklore (see also Paredes and 

Bauman1972; Bauman 1975, 1977a, 1977c). 

An illustrative example might be useful here, to underscore the distinctive 

ethnographic perspective I am suggesting. A particularly effective example, directly 

relevant to children's folklore, concerns counting-out rhymes, those forms, like eeny-

meeny-minie-mo or one potato, two potato, that children commonly use to allocate 

game roles or establish other kinds of priority orderings. Counting-out rhymes were an 

early focus of anthropological interest in children's folklore on the part of nineteenth 

century scholars, who saw in them a survival of ancient forms of divination (see, e.g., 

Bolton 1888). More recent scholars, including Roger Caillois (1961:36) and Brian Sutton-

Smith (1959:89-90), concerned with the organizing principles of various game activities 

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and the correlation between these organizing principles and aspects of adult social 

relations, have classified counting-out as a game of chance, based on the formal 

structure of the activity without regard to its actual use. 

Kenneth Goldstein (1971) , however, undertook to investigate ethnographically 

how children actually conduct the activity of counting-out, and made an interesting 

discovery, namely, that children employ a variety of quite conscious strategies, 

including extension of the rhyme by additional formulae, selection of alternative 

rhymes, skipping regular counts, changing positions, and the like, to manipulate the 

apparently random mechanism of counting-out to ensure specific desired outcomes. 

That is, for Goldstein's population, counting-out is actually a game of strategy, masked 

over by a seeming reliance on chance. His findings demonstrate counting-out to be a 

more complex activity than had formerly been recognized, in which the public fiction of 

chance and impersonality is maintained at the same time that a series of strategies are 

available to the counter and the counted for manipulating the outcome, and the counter 

especially has a considerable amount of latitude and power in controlling the activity. 

Goldstein's analysis thus reveals a more complex range of competencies to be mobilized 

in the conduct of counting-out than just the mastery of the rhyme and the associated 

kinesic and proxemic aspects of the activity would suggest. 

The various educators to whom I have presented this case have often been made 

uneasy by it, as somehow suggesting that innocent children are in fact duplicitous and 

manipulative, and that ethnography, by implication, is the business of exposing the 

seamy underside of childhood. Still, it seems to me that ethnography can do far worse 

than to stand as an enterprise that pursues an understanding of how people really go 

about the conduct of their social lives; with reference to children's folklore, this means 

investigating their folklore as a cultural system in its own terms, attending to the ways 

and contexts in which it is used by them in the conduct of peer group social life, 

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neglecting nothing that is meaningful to them—decorous or indecorous, sense or 

nonsense—without asking first if it is meaningful or appropriate to adults sensibilities. 

Insofar as a rational and responsive educational system must take fundamentally into 

account what a child at any given stage of development already knows and can do, 

nothing having to do with the competence of children is irrelevant to education, 

whatever relation it may bear to adult competence, and whether or not it ultimately 

makes its way into the classroom. 

Now, much the same kind of argument could aptly be made for the study of 

children's peer group culture in all its aspects, not just children's folklore. Why single 

out children's folklore for special attention? I believe that the investigation of children's 

folklore is especially productive because folklore represents communication in its 

special modes, modes that are traditional, foregrounded, highly marked, valued, and 

enjoyed. Folklore forms are display forms, public means for the presentation and 

representation of oneself, one's culture, and one's social structure to others in ways that 

underscore both their meaningfulness to the group and one's own competence as a 

member of it. The forms of children's folklore, as I conceive them, are the special 

traditionally shared means for displaying one's competence to others, subject to 

evaluation for the skill and effectiveness mobilized in performance, the most artful way 

of speaking and behaving in the children's peer group repertoire. As such, children's 

folklore is an index to what is important to children in the peer group, and to their 

communicative competence within it. 
 

Naturalistic Observation and Children’s Folklore 

All that I have said thus far addresses the nature of ethnography as a 

perspective, centering on the goal of developing descriptive theories of what one needs 

to know and how one needs to behave to operate in a socially constituted and culturally 

defined world, from the point of view of endogenously organized meaning—meaning 

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apprehended and interpreted through the eyes of members of the social group itself. 

There remains yet the matter of ethnography as method, usually identified as 

naturalistic, open-ended, and qualitative, by contrast with the more experimental, 

operational, and quantitative methods of behavioral research. There is already an 

extensive and growing literature debating the merits and shortcomings of these 

respective research orientations, much of it produced by people better qualified than I 

am to discuss these issues. Accordingly, I do not propose to deal at length with the 

general issue of methodology in the ethnography of children's folklore, confining my 

remarks instead to some of the special problems attendant on this research. 

I do believe that the ethnographic perspective dictates at the very least a 

naturalistic frame of reference, whatever specific methodologies are invoked for the 

gathering and interpretation of data. By a naturalistic frame of reference. I mean at least 

an implicit concern for naturally occurring, contextually situated behavior, 

unmanipulated and unconstrained by externally imposed methodological imperatives. 

This is not to say that everything the ethnographer wants to know is evident in 

externally observable, naturally occurring behavior, or even that truly natural behavior 

is always accessible to the observer; if nothing else, the anthropological version of the 

Heisenberg principle calls into question whether any behavior, as observed by the 

researcher, is ever truly "natural." Nevertheless, a naturalistic frame of reference can 

and should be used as a guide and a standard for the evaluation of methodological 

validity in ethnographic research. 

I raise these issues because naturalistic observation and participation is often a 

special problem in the study of children's folklore—the free peer group activity of 

children is by its very nature a privileged realm in which adults are alien intruders, 

especially so insofar as much of the children's folklore repertoire violated what children 

understand to be adult standards of decorum. The ethnography of children's folklore 

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thus raises to special importance the need to establish rapport with informants, to 

convince them of the genuineness of interest in the full range of their folklore repertoire, 

in order to overcome their reluctance to open their expressive world to adult scrutiny., 

Moreover, it is a fundamental characteristic of many, if not most, forms of 

children's folklore that they are spontaneous in occurrence and fleeting in duration, 

such that one never knows for certain whether or when a group of children will engage 

in them. Thus, direct elicitation, pump-priming, or the establishment of an induced 

natural context (Goldstein 1967), all requiring prior familiarity with the repertoire, may 

be necessary before the observer might have the opportunity to step back and allow the 

dynamics of peer group interaction to take their course. 

On the other hand, rapport once established, adult interest can also be a stimulus 

to performance, by providing an occasion for it, since children do enjoy engaging in the 

performance and exchange of their folklore. Sometimes, the licensed ignorance of the 

adult outsider can itself provide a useful stimulus, as in cases where all the children in 

the group know and are tired of a particular routine, and the presence of someone who 

purports not to know it provides a fresh occasion to trot it out once more. The essential 

point is, whatever methodological ingenuity is called for, it should be informed by the 

goals of the ethnographic perspective and hew as closely as possible to the naturalistic 

frame of reference. 
 

Examinations of Solicitational Routines 

Let me turn now to a series of concrete and related examples drawn from an 

extended research project in children's folklore that I undertook with some of my 

students in 1973 through 1976 in conjunction with the Southwest Educational 

Development Laboratory. Our research was centered especially on children's verbal 

folklore in the conviction that the ethnographic study of these forms would reveal 

useful information about the communicative competence of children within the context 

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of their own self-motivated and enjoyable peer group activity, information that might 

not be so readily accessible from the study of children's communicative behavior in 

more formal settings, or in interaction with adults. Moreover, because of the crucial 

centrality of language skills to contemporary American education, we felt that the 

strongest case for the potential contribution of children's folklore to education could be 

made in this sphere. 

The project focused on the folklore repertoire of 5- through 8-year-old Anglo, 

black, and Chicano children in Austin, Texas. At the very beginning of our fieldwork it 

became apparent that perhaps the most popular folklore forms, at least among the 

Anglo and Chicano children in that age range, were riddles and related forms like 

knock-knocks and catches, to which I applied the collective label solicitational routines. 

These are expressive routines (Hymes 1971b:58), which are distinguished by their 

incorporation within the formal structure of a dyadic social exchange consisting of at 

least one solicitation (a speech act, the function of which is to elicit a verbal or kinesic 

response) plus the response (Bellack, Kliebard, Hyman, and Smith 1966: Sinclair and 

Coulthard 1975). At first glance, from the outside, solicitational routines appear as 

small, rather inconsequential forms, considered trivial and corny if not downright 

foolish by most adults. On closer examination through the ethnographic lens, however, 

solicitational routines reveal themselves to be fascinating in their complexity, 

implicating a wide range of linguistic and sociolinguistic virtuosity. Perhaps if I can 

leap the triviality barrier, to use Sutton-Smith's apt phrase, by showing something of the 

complexity of these small folklore forms, the productiveness of studying children's 

folklore intensively in all its richness will be more readily accepted. 

I stressed earlier that the ethnographic study of folklore contrasts strongly with 

those investigative perspectives on folklore that draw conclusions based on the abstract, 

normative structure of verbal genres, without attending to their actual social use. Such 

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normative conceptions of genre, together with allied conceptions of folklore forms as 

fixed, traditional texts, and as esthetic vehicles subject to evaluation for the skill and 

effectiveness with which they are done, make both scholars and lay-men disvalue and 

tend to disregard flawed performances; who wants to record a garbled rhyme or riddle 

when it is possible to find someone who can perform it well? Yet these flawed but 

recognizable attempts at performing traditional genres constitute a significant 

proportion of the expressive output of young children in their first few years of peer 

group involvement, say, from 5 to 7. 

Take knock-knock jokes, for example, one popular type of solicitational routine. 

In studying the use of solicitational routines among 5 through 8-year-olds,1 we collected 

knock-knocks in varying degrees of approximation to the standard form, such as the 

following: 

1  A: Knock, knock. 
 B: Who's there? 

A: Lisa [child's own name]. 
B: Lisa who? 
A: Lisa Nora [name of present peer]. 

 
2  A: Knock, knock. 

B: Who's there? 
A: Amos. 
B: Amos who? 
A: Amos mosquito bit me. Knock knock. 
B: Who's there? 
A: Amos mosquito bit me again. 

 
3  A: Knock, knock. 

B: Who's there? 
A: Olive.  
B: Olive who? 
A: Olive [I love] you. 

 

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Only the last of these is a well-formed traditional knock-knock. What are we then 

to make of the others, both apparently flawed by the normative standards of the genre? 

Matters are clarified somewhat if we reveal that the first of these routines was 

contributed by a child of 5 years/3 months, the second by a child of 6 years/1 month, 

and third by a child of 8years/6 months. The flawed knock-knocks in fact represent 

stages in a developmental progression, beginning with a stage in which the child has 

mastered the generic form of the routine but does not recognize the traditionality of the 

entire routine or understand the speech play in the standard knock-knocks, and so coins 

her own third line as if she were really presenting herself at the door, and fifth line by 

arbitrarily conjoining another name from the immediate situational environment with 

her own. The child who produced the next routine is attempting to repeat a traditional 

knock-knock (Knock, knock/Who's there?/Amos/Amos who?/A mosquito bit me. 

Knock, knock/Who's there?/Andy/Andy who? /Andy bit me again), knowing that 

proper knock-knocks are ready-made, but is again defeated by the speech play, which 

rearranges lexical boundaries to transform Amos to a mos-quito (she may in fact not 

recognize Amos as a name) and Andy to and he. The final stage in the progression is the 

correct doing of a traditional knock-knock. Time does not permit me to elaborate more 

fully on what is involved in this process, though I have treated it at length elsewhere 

(Bauman 1977b). The point I want to make here is that taking the data as they come, 

consistent with the ethnographic perspective, allows us to take account of the flawed 

renditions together with the good ones, and to see them as exemplifying stages in the 

acquisition of competence to perform a particular genre, and as indices to the range of 

cognitive and communicative skills implicated in the performance of the genre, not 

merely as mistakes to be disqualified. This is enculturation within the peer group, not 

from an adultocentric perspective. 

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One of the principal hallmarks of recent ethnographically informed folklore 

research, consistent with the reorientation from a concentration on discrete normative 

texts, abstracted from context, is its attention to the structure of the situational context 

of the performance of folklore and the patterning of folkloric performance within such 

situation or events. Drawing another example from our study of solicitational routines, 

we may illustrate the productiveness of this analytical focus for the study of children's 

folklore. The example is drawn from John McDowell's penetrating analysis of a riddling 

session involving three Chicano children, ranging in ages from 6 to 8 (1979:135-146). 

Embedded in this session, of approximately a half hour's duration, were eleven routines 

dealing with the semantic domain of locomotion: 

1  What has eight wheels and rolls? 
    -- Roller skates.  
2  What has two wheels and pedals? 
    -- A bicycle. 
3  What has four wheels, no pedals, and a steering wheel? 
    -- A car. 
4  What has four legs and can run? 
    -- A mustang. 
5  What has three wheels and pedals? 
    -- A tricycle. 
6  What has four legs and can't walk? 
    -- A chair. 
7  What has two legs, it can walk? 
    -- A monkey. 
8  What has long legs and its hard to walk? 
    -- A seagull. 
9  What has two seats, four wheels, and they can roll? 
    -- A car. 
10  What has lots of windows and they can fly? 
    -- Airplane. 
11  What are those little clocks and its in your car? 

-- A dragger. 
 

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Two of these, numbers 1 and 6, are traditional riddles; the remaining nine are 

what McDowell has labeled descriptive routines (1979:34), in which the solicitation is in 

the form of a question, but the question is not ready-made, i.e., traditional, but rather 

newly coined by the child, following one of the syntactic and textural patterns 

characteristic of traditional riddles. Most commonly, the descriptive routine calls on the 

respondent to identify an object by describing it in the solicitation in terms of one or 

more (usually more) of its salient attributes. McDowell's analysis demonstrates how, 

through the exchange of solicitational routines, the children participating in the session 

systematically construct and explore a folk taxonomy of locomotion, as represented in 

Figure 1. Though clearly not exhaustive, this taxonomy is yet highly logical and 

structured by the taxonomic relationships of inclusion and contrast. 

McDowell goes on to show how the logic and order of the basic taxonomy is 

interpenetrated by another type of reasoning, in which prevailing cultural orders are 

dismembered and rearranged in apparently anomalous ways. The shift resides in items 

4 and 6, which, by incorporating ambiguity, depart from the transparent description 

characteristic of descriptive routines. The metaphorical attribution of legs to chairs, 

which should thus be capable of locomotion but are not, suggests the possibility of 

restructuring the taxonomy on another basis, as does the association of an automobile 

with a wild horse, otherwise in contrast as machine and animal, but alternatively 

conjoined on the basis of fleetness. McDowell's analysis thus reveals a group of children 

aware of the dual capacity of language to encode and convey shared cultural meanings, 

but also to rearrange the structure of those meanings in alternative ways, all explored 

through the medium of traditionally organized speech play. Consider what an array of 

“language arts" is implicated here—mastery of generic form, encoding of salient 

descriptive attributes, logical relationships of inclusion and contrast, ambiguity in 

metaphor, and so on—not completely evident in the solicitation routine texts taken 

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singly, or from attention to the traditional riddles alone, but from the systematic 

analysis of an aspect of the patterning of the event as a whole. 

 

 

Figure 1: The Taxonomy of Locomotion [From McDowell 1979, 138] 

 

A different kind of confrontation between order and disorder, implicating not so 

much logic and classification as the very communicative resources and rules by which 

conversation is conducted, is embodied in a third type of solicitation routine, the catch. 

Danielle Roemer, who has made an intensive study or these routines (1977), defines 

catches as two-party, humorous, interactional routines that are strategically designed to 

effect the surprise and victimization of one of the participants. They provide for the 

enactment of a stylized conversation between two parties: The child who initiates the 

exchange assumes the role of the trickster; the respondent acts as the straightman 

(1977:13). Typical examples of the genre, commonly represented in the repertoire, are 

the following: 

 

 

 

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1 A: Open up the gate.   [The ends of A's index fingers are         
                                 together; his thumbs are pointing up.] 

B: [Pulls A's index fingers toward himself.] 
A: Bang, bang, you're dead  [A’s hands are now in the shape of 

                 Fifty bullets in your head. “guns” which he shoots at B.] 
      Brush your teeth and go to bed.   

   
2  A: Say a number after everything I say. 
                 I saw a dead buzzard layin' in the road. 
                 I one'd it. 

B: I two'd it. 
A: I three'd it. 
B: I four'd it. 
A:I five'd it. 
B: I six'd it. 
A: I seven'd it. 
B: I eight [ate] it. 
 

3 A: What's your name? 
B: Jane. 
A: What's this?    [Points to her own nose.] 
B: A nose. 
A: What's in my hand?   [Shows empty palm.) 
B: Nothing. 
A: Jane knows nothing. 
 

The catch, as a genre that almost universally incurs the disfavor of adults because 

of its violation of the interactional ideals of trust and reciprocity, its licensed physical 

aggression and verbal insult, and its encouragement of profanity, albeit in a playful 

way, must depend for its survival on the oral tradition of the peer group, receiving little 

or no reinforcement from polite riddle books, educational television shows, or teachers. 

Yet, if we can suspend moral judgment long enough to examine catches in their own 

terms, we find them to involve a remarkably sophisticated structure, centering on the 

manipulation of linguistic and social interactional resources and their interrelationships. 

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The principal communicative resource exploited in catch routines is the 

interpretive frame, the metamessage signaling how a particular message is to be 

interpreted. Through the mechanism of the routine, a context is established by the 

trickster that keys a particular range of meanings to lead the straightman on to further 

participation. At the end, however, the apparently harmless message keyed by the 

original frame is 'subtly reframed, to challenge or destroy the reputable social self of the 

straightman through licensed aggression, embarrassment, or other means of 

degradation. Even worse, this is done in such a manner that the straightman is revealed 

to have collaborated in his own fool-making. In the examples just presented, 

straightmen variously find themselves inviting symbolic aggression as an innocuous 

gesture is transformed into a symbolically dangerous one, admitting to the eating of 

carrion (consisting of a dead buzzard, which is itself an eater of carrion and so doubly 

polluted) by a shift from one meaning of a homonymic pair to the other, or constructing 

a verbal admission of their own ignorance through the establishment of discourse 

cohesion uniting three apparently unrelated utterances, one of which is itself refrained 

by a similar homonymic shift. 

These catches are thus a striking lesson in the sensitivity of meaning to its context 

of use. Catch routines, thus analyzed, reveal their users not only to be possessed of a 

range of interesting linguistic competencies, but of a striking awareness of 

sociolinguistic nuances as well, all mobilized in the playful service of social disorder. 

So far, I have been talking of children's folklore in fairly generalized terms, 

without much regard-to the many dimensions of diversity that characterize American 

children. To a certain extent, this is warranted by the substantial degree of sharing of 

repertoire that does in fact exist among children throughout the country; I have a vague 

hunch that children's folklore may be more homogeneous nationwide than any other 

part of our American expressive repertoire. Nevertheless, there are many lines along 

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which the repertoire is diversified as well, paralleling those that underlie the diversity 

of American society at large. 

Exploring this diversity is a dual problem, part ethnographic, part comparative. 

The relationship between the two in anthropological inquiry has been treated by Dell 

Hymes elsewhere in this volume, so I will not dwell on it here, but simply suggest a few 

of the dimensions if social variability in the children's folklore repertoire. In doing so. I 

want to make clear that none of these dimensions operates in discrete isolation, sorting 

the children and their folklore into neat boxes. It is more accurately the case that such 

demographic factors as age, sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and language may all 

bear a simultaneous and inter-related influence on such folkloric variables as generic 

preference, performance style, content, and participation structures. Although the 

relative associations along these sets of variables is certainly amenable to statistical 

analysis, the work remains to be done. I can only suggest in fairly broad terms how 

some of the factors may sort themselves out. 

I pointed out in an earlier example how developmental differences may affect the 

production of knock-knocks. To continue further with solicitational routines, it is clearly 

the case for the Austin children we studied that while Anglo and Chicano children both 

have a substantial investment in riddling, the Chicano children care relatively little for a 

range of solicitational routines, like knock-knocks and others I have not discussed here, 

that are great favorites among the Anglo children.2 Older Chicano children, though, 

beyond our 5 through 8 age range, do enjoy an adapted form of knock-knock that plays 

on code switching, as in: 

1  A: Knock, knock. 
B: Who's there? 
A: Apio verde [celery]. 
B: Apio verde who? 
A: Apio verde (happy birthday) to you. 
 

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or 
 
 

2  A: Knock, knock. 
B: Who's there? 
A: Sue. 
B: Sue who? 
A: Sue [su] madre. 

 
On the other hand, there is a particularly intriguing type of solicitation routine 

that we collected only from Chicano children, and only in Spanish. These involve a 

solicitation in the form of a statement in which the answer is concealed by the 

arrangement of word boundaries and can only be guessed by rearranging syllables, 

morpheme; or lexemes across these boundaries. For example (McDowell 1976: 176): 
 

1  Oro no es, plata no es.  ¿Qué es? 
    -- Plátano. 

2  Yo aquí, tu allá.   ¿Qué es? 
    -- Toalla. 

 
There are traditional English routines analogous to these (Emrich 1970: 58-59), but they 

are not current among our Anglo population. 

Even for forms that are popular in both ethnic groups, there are subtle 

differences of emphasis. In riddles and descriptive routines, for instance, the Anglo 

children's repertoire shows a far greater penetration of influences from popular 

culture—figures from television and comic books, for example—than does that of the 

Chicano children, reflecting perhaps the greater accessibility of these elements of mass 

culture to the more affluent Anglo children (McDowell 1979:Ch. 8). By contrast, the 

Chicano riddlers exploit body parts as comparisons and solutions far more than their 

Anglo counterparts, which McDowell convincingly attributes to a closer adherence to 

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traditional riddling content, for body parts are unquestionably prominent in older 

riddling traditions. 

By contrast with both the Anglo and Chicano children, the children in our black 

population3 have very little interest in traditional, ready-made solicitational routines of 

any kind within the peer group, with one notable exception. The one form of 

solicitational routine that is popular, though, is a form of rhyming speech play that 

represents a kind of catch.4 Some of these are traditional, such as: 

1 A: Say blue. 
B: Blue. 
A: You got the flu. 
 
or 
 

2 A: Say brown. 
B: Brown. 
A: You're a clown. 
 

Moreover, these are often associated, in performance, with other rhyming forms that are 

also contestive, putting down the person to whom they are addressed much as catches 

do, but not in solicitational form, as in, 

My acka backa, 
My soda cracker, 
My B 0 booty hole. 
Your mama, your daddy, 
Your great granny 
Got a hole in her panty, 
Got a big behind 
Like Frankenstein, 
Don't eat no meat 
On Lincoln Street, 
Don't drink no wine 
On Chicago line. 
 

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Just scratching the surface in this manner, we have touched on ethnic and 

linguistic differences relating to generic preference and content. Let us invoke some 

other factors by reference to another genre, namely, handclaps, routines that involve a 

pattern of handclapping with one or more partners to the accompaniment of a sung or 

chanted rhyme. Handclaps are preeminently a girls' form, with a substantial sharing of 

the rhyme repertoire among the three ethnic groups we studied. The differences to be 

found here have principally to do with participant structure and style. Thus, Beverly 

Stoeltje (1978) has noted that among black girls, the signal offering to begin hand-

clapping is nonverbal, i.e., the presentation to one's potential partner of the hands in the 

position for the opening clap: left palm up, right palm down. If the invitation is 

accepted, the initiator launches into the chosen rhyme, picked up immediately by her 

partner. Among Anglo girls, the invitation to handclap is made verbally: "Let's do Miss 

Mary Mack," or whichever rhyme the presenter wishes to perform. Again, black girls 

are far more likely than Anglo girls to use syncopated rhythms in handclaps, e.g., a 

three-beat handclap pattern in conjunction with a 2/4 musical rhythm in the rhymes, 

while the standard Anglo pattern is a two-move handclap with the same 2/4 rhymes. 

 

Education and the Ethnography of Childlore 

Now, what do all these commonalities and contrasts imply for education? 

Beyond highlighting the unities and diversities of our society and culture in general, it 

is very difficult to say precisely at this early point in the research what the meaningful 

differences are, let alone what their educational implications may be. To be sure, certain 

hypotheses do suggest themselves as especially worthy of further research. To take only 

one example, drawing again on solicitational routines, it seems to me that insofar as 

riddles are expressive models of the kind of interrogation and interaction that is 

ubiquitous in the school setting (cf. Roberts and Forman 1972; Mehan 1982), 

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engagement in riddling may have real adaptive value for children in the 5 through 8 

age range we studied, as they come to terms with the participant structures of schooling 

in our society. Put another way, our prevailing educational practices may select against 

children, like the black children in our Austin study population, who, for whatever 

social or cultural reason, do not engage in speech play of this kind, though their 

expressive repertoire may be very rich in other forms that the Anglo children don't do. 

But the point is that the Anglo children don't lose anything in the classroom by not 

doing them. 

Concerning the potential educational relevance of the ethnography of children's 

folklore, however, I can speak with more confidence. Here, I would stress two points. I 

am convinced, first of all, that the most significant potential contribution that the close 

study of children's folklore can make is in revealing the truly impressive range of 

linguistic and sociolinguistic competencies that is fostered by the children's own peer 

group culture.5 To repeat an earlier point, nothing having to do with the competencies 

of children should be foreign to education, and children's folklore shows children at 

their natural virtuoso best, mobilizing skills that are not evident in their social life 

outside the peer group. What makes this point still more telling is that proficiency in the 

peer group is not necessarily correlated for all groups of children, or individuals, with 

success in the classroom. I am far from the first to point out that for minority children 

especially, various kinds of true communicative virtuosity and communicative 

leadership may be excluded from or selected again in the school; William Labov has 

argued as much most impressively' (1972), as have others. Surely, a humane and 

rational educational system ought to be responsive to such factors, by profiting from 

and building on the in-sights that the ethnography of childlore can provide. 

The other major concluding point I would make stems from my conviction that 

the arts should play a significant role in education and my clear impression that 

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increasing numbers of educators are coming to share this conviction. This suggests that 

children's folklore, representing what might aptly be called the indigenous art forms of 

childhood, unquestionably valued and enjoyed by the children themselves, might 

constitute a significant resource in the development of culturally responsive, locally 

relevant arts programs in the schools, together with--perhaps as an ante--cedent point 

of departure for--the general run of arts curricula that are oriented more to the fine art 

forms of western culture. 

How these suggestions might best be implemented remains an open question, 

calling for a substantial amount of further research and program, development. There 

are certainly problems to be confronted in the course of this research and development, 

not the least of which is the danger of sapping the vitality and spontaneity of children's 

folklore by neutering and sterilizing it for classroom use or polite consumption. What 

seems to me clear, though, is that the results of investigating children's folklore will 

amply repay the effort, and above all that ethnography must play a leading part in these 

efforts. 

 

Richard Bauman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana 
University, Bloomington. The principal foci of his research include narrative, oral poetics, 
performance, genre, and language ideologies. Among his publications are Verbal Art as 
Performance (1977), Let Your Words Be Few (1983), Story, Performance, and Event 
(1986), Voices of Modernity (with Charles L. Briggs, 2003; Sapir Prize 2006), A World of 
Others’ Words (2004), and A Most Valuable Medium (2023). Bauman has been a 
Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of the 
Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award of the American Folklore Society, and the Franz Boas 
Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. 

 

References Cited 

Bauman, Richard. 1975. “Verbal Art as Performance.” American Anthropologist 77(2): 290-
311. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1975.77.2.02a00030 

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_____. 1977a. “Settlement Patterns on the Frontiers of Folklore.” In Frontiers of Folklore, 
edited by William Basom, 121-31. Denver: Westview Press. 

_____. 1977b. “Linguistics, Anthropology, and Verbal Art: Toward a Unified 
Perspective, with a Special Discussion of Childrens’ Folklore.” In Linguistics and 
Anthropology: Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, 
edited by Muriel Saville-Troike, 13-36. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University 
Press. 

_____. 1977c. Verbal Art as Performance. Rowley: Newberry House. 

Bellack, Arno, Herbert Kliebard, Ronald Hyman, and Frank Smith. 1966. The Language of 
the Classroom. New York: Teacher’s College Press. 

Bolton, Henry C. 1888. The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children. New York: D. Appleton.  

Brady, Margaret, and Rosalind Eckhart. 1975. Black Girls at Play: Folkloric Perspectives on 
Child Development. Austin: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.  

Caillois, Roger. 1961. Man, Play, and Games. Glencoe: The Free Press. 

Emrich, Duncan. 1970. The Nonsense Book. New York: Four Winds Press.  

Goldstein, Kenneth S. 1967. “The Induced Natural Context: An Ethnographic Folklore 
Field Technique.” In Essays on the Verbal and Visual Art, edited by June Helm, 1-6. 
Seattle: University of Washington Press for the American Ethnological Society.  

_____. 1971. “Strategy in Counting Out: An Ethnographic Folklore Field Study.” In The 
Study of Games, edited by Elliott M. Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith, 167-78. New 
York: Wiley. 

Hymes, Dell. 1971a. “Competence and Performance in Linguistic Theory.” In Language 
Acquisition: Models and Methods, edited by Renira Huxley and Elisabeth Ingram, 
3-22. New York: Academic. 

_____. 1971b. “On Linguistic Theory, Communicative Competence, and the Education 
of Disadvantaged Children.” In Anthropological Perspectives on Education, edited 
by Murray L. Wax, Stanley Diamond, and Frederick O. Gearing. New York: Basic 
Books.  

Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City, Part II: The Vernacular and Its Social 
Setting. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press.  

McDowell, John. 1976. “Riddling and Enculturation: A Glance at the Cerebral Child,” 
Working Papers in Sociolinguistics, 36. Austin: Southwest Educational 
Development Laboratory.  

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_____. 1979. Children’s Riddling: The Interrogative Ludic Routine in Child Cognition and 
Sociability. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

Mehan, Hugh. 1982. “The Structure of Classroom Events and their Consequences for 
Student Performance.” In Children In and Out of School: Ethnography and Education, 
edited by Perry Gilmore and Allan A. Glatthorn, 59-87. Washington, D.C.: CAL. 

Paredes, Américo, and Richard Bauman, Editors. 1972. Toward New Perspectives in 
Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press. 

Park, Rose. 1972. An Investigation of Riddles of Children Ages 5-14. PhD dissertation. 
Columbia University.  

Roberts, John M., and Michael L. Forman. 1972. “Riddles: Expressive Models of 
Interrogation.” In Directions in Sociolinguistics, edited by John Gumperz and Dell 
Hymes, 180-210. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.  

Roemer, Danielle. 1977. A Social Interactional Analysis of Anglo Children’s Folklore: Catches 
and Narratives. PhD dissertation. University of Texas.  

Schwartzman, Helen B. 1976. “The Anthropological Study of Children’s Play.” Annual 
Review of Anthropology 5: 289-328. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2949315 

Schultz, Thomas R. 1974. “Development of the Appreciation of Riddles.” Child 
Development 45(1): 100-05. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1127755 

Sinclair, J. McH., and R.M. Coulthard. 1975. Towards and Analysis of Discourse. London: 
Oxford. 

Stoeltje, Beverly. 1978. Children’s Handclaps: Informal Learning in Play. Austin: Southwest 
Educational Development Laboratory. [See also the reprint of this publication in 
this Special Issue, doi.????####????. 

Sutton-Smith, Brian. 1959. The Games of New Zealand Children. Berkeley and Los Angeles: 
University of California Press.  

_____. 1976. “A Developmental Structural Account of Riddles.” In Speech Play: Research 
and Resources for Studying Linguistic Creativity, edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Turnbull, Colin. 1961. The Forest People. New York: Simon & Schuster. 

Whitt, J. Kenneth, and Norman Prentice. 1977. “Cognitive Processes in the Development 
of Children’s Enjoyment and Comprehension of Joking Riddles.” Developmental 
Psychology 13(2): 129-36. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.13.2.129 

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1 The following discussion of knock-knock routines draws upon unpublished work by Andrea Meditch, 
undertaken as part of the above-mentioned research project on children's folklore, under the sponsorship 
of the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, Austin, Texas. 
2 Note carefully that there is no implication here that they can't do them, or that they are in some way 
deficient for not doing them, simply that empirically they don't do them. 
3 The discussion of black children's folklore draws upon unpublished work by Margaret Brady, in 
conjunction with the children's folklore research project mentioned earlier (see note 1). See also Brady and 
Eckhardt 1975. 
4 Note again that I am not saying they don't have the capacity for them, only that they are not a real part 
of their repertoire, any more than Spanish language solicitational routines that depend upon rearranging 
word boundaries are part of the Anglo children's repertoire. They do other things. 
5 These same children's folklore materials are also highly illuminating of cognitive abilities, which are 
outside the scope of this paper. See Park 1972; Shultz 1974; Sutton-Smith 1976; Whitt and Prentice 1977. 

 

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Riddling and Enculturation 
A Glance at the Cerebral Child 

John Holmes McDowell 
Indiana University, Emeritus 

 
This paper attempts to illustrate with concrete data that riddles serve as a didactic device 
to sharpen the wits of young children. The riddle is described as a verbal routine which 
adapts the interrogative system of a speech community to purposes of play. Riddles 
concerning motion or locomotion of animals, machines, and toys were collected in a 
single riddling session, from three Chicano children aged 5-7. The output of these 
neophyte riddles is discussed in the context of the acquisition and refinement of cognitive 
categories, and a folk taxonomy focused on the semantic domain of locomotion is 
suggested. Riddling is viewed as a didactic mechanism conducive to experimentation 
with received notions of order, and elaboration of novel cognitive orders. In riddling, at 
various stages, children learn to formulate culturally acceptable classifications; to 
articulate classifications at variance with cultural conventions; and finally to assess 
language and classification as arbitrary instruments reflecting only partially the 
continuous texture of experience. 

 

     The present paper, dealing with a form of children's riddling which lacks 

cultural saliency, represents another assault on what Brian Sutton- Smith has 

felicitously termed the triviality barrier (Sutton-Smith 1970). Childish behavior is 

so thoroughly stigmatized in our canons of adult comportment that much of the 

spectrum of characteristically children's activity has been systematically 

neglected or at best observed with disdain or apology in our social sciences. We 

owe to Johan Huizinga the definitive affirmation of the importance of play, 

adult's and child's, in the shaping of culture: 

Play is more than a mere physiological phenomenon or psychological reflex...It 
is a significant function—that is to say, there is some sense in it. In play there is 
something "at play" which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts 
meaning to the action. (1950:1) 

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Subsequent research, taking as fundamental the notion advanced in the above 

statement, has demonstrated beyond any measure of doubt the non-trivial nature of 

children's play. It would be possible, on the basis of a growing body of research too 

extensive to review here, to characterize the play of children as a crucial function, 

central in the acquisition, maintenance, and modification of culture (see Piaget 1965; 

Roberts, Arth, and Bush 1959; Roberts and Sutton-Smith 1962; Sutton-Smith 1967; 

Sanchez and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1971; McDowell 1974). Moreover, as Huizinga's 

initial effort intended, the study of the play motive in culture has blossomed into a 

powerful analytical tool, with major applications in several domains of human activity 

(Huizinga 1950; Abrahams 1973). 

The riddle, with which we will be concerned in what follows, is among the most 

venerable of the genres of folklore, a source of instructive play in many societies, the 

Venda for example (Blacking 1961), and an enduring puzzle and challenge to students 

of expressive culture. Simply defined the riddle is a verbal routine which adapts the 

interrogative system of a speech community to purposes of play. The question, a 

fundamental speech resource, normally employed in the exchange of informat1on, 

serves in the riddling context as a means of examining wrinkles or ambiguities latent 

within the verbal code (see Abrahams 1972). Riddles, like other ludic forms, reverse the 

pattern of expectations normally associated with the activity involved. The serious 

question enables the questioner to solicit information unknown to him (except in the 

instance or rhetorical questions, which arguably constitute an elaboration of basic 

questioning procedures). In riddling, on the other hand, the questioner solicits 

information already known, indeed the riddler alone determines correct and incorrect 

responses. Some contemporary riddling makes this reversal all the more conspicuous 

by citing an answer for which the riddles must then provide an appropriate question. 

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Riddling competence necessarily builds on prior interrogative competence. For 

this reason we rarely find children riddling before the age of 5 or so. Even so, the 5 or 6 

year old riddler makes of riddling something rather different than the practiced 

routines of his adolescent counterparts. As Sutton-Smith has remarked, the former is 

prone to view the riddle as "a puzzling question with an arbitrary answer" (Sutton-

Smith 1972). In another variation, the younger riddler is likely to design riddles which 

are transparent questions, lacking the characteristic block element responsible for the 

semantic confusion normally generated in the riddle. The block element, revolving on 

metaphor or another form of artful obfuscation, remains somewhat beyond the grasp of 

the riddling neophyte (see Georges and Dundes 1963), The initiate riddler captures first 

the aural texture and rhythm of the riddle, and only later adjusts to the more 

demanding strictures of riddle content. 

Riddling at each stage along the journey to artful ambiguation apparently serves 

functions connected to the acquisition of cognitive and interactional skills (McDowell 

1974). In making this assertion we cross the triviality barrier and attribute vital 

functions to a form of child's play often annoying to mothers, and until recently entirely 

invisible to scholars. In the remainder of this paper I will discuss and interpret the 

output of riddling neophytes during the course of a single riddling session. This 

riddling will be viewed in the context of the acquisition and refinement of cognitive 

categories. The riddles were collected by myself in Austin, Texas, from a trio of Chicano 

children, ages 5-7. This riddling session structured itself around one specific theme, 

addressed in several of the individual riddles, concerning the motion or locomotion of 

machines, animals, and toys. As a text for the present purposes, I have extracted and 

present here those routines touching on this particular topic. Other intervening material 

has been edited out. My presentation here retains the original order of occurrence. 

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1) What has 8 wheels and rolls?  
    Roller skates. 

2) What has 2 wheels and pedals?  
    A bicycle. 

3) What has 4 wheels, no pedals, and a steering wheel?  
    A car. 

4) What has 4 legs and can run?  
    A mustang. 

5) What has 3 wheels and pedals?  
    A tricycle. 

6) What has 4 legs and can't walk?  
    A chair. 

7) What has 2 legs, it can walk?  
    A monkey. 

8) What has long legs and its hard to walk? 
    A seagull. 

9) What has 2 seats, 4 wheels, and they can roll?  
    A car. 

10) What has lots of windows and they can fly?  
    Airplane. 

11) What are those little clocks and its in your car?  
    A dragger. 

 

We have here, then, a corpus of interrogative routines of the transparent sort, 

involving unambiguous questions (with one or two exceptions, to be dealt with below) 

whose answers are uniquely determined by the interrogator. In point of fact, items #4 

and #6 above, the two exceptions, allow us to call this sample a transitional one between 

neophyte and more experienced riddling. The riddlers have mastered the texture and 

rhythm of their genre, and are making tentative stabs into appropriate content. 

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In order to convincingly penetrate the triviality barrier with this folkloric 

material, I will have recourse to the concept of folk taxonomy. The starting point in the 

analysis may as well be Ward Goodenough's formulation of the cognitive approach to 

culture: 

A society's culture consists of whatever it is one has to know in order to operate 
in a manner acceptable to its members... It is the forms of things that people have 
in their mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting 
them. (Goodenough 1957:167) 

Culture, in this formulation, consists in mental structures, or to follow contemporary 

parlance, folk taxonomies. These folk taxonomies organize the experiential world into 

discrete and logically ordered semantic domains. The cognitivist argues that all human 

behavior derives from these models, mental structures, or folk taxonomies (Sturtevant 

1964).  

Returning to our corpus of children's riddles, I would contend that the riddles 

centering on locomotion demarcate this theme as a semantic field, and provide 

substantial detail concerning the structure of its component categories. The riddles 

themselves provide only the tokens, or concrete objects in the taxonomy, and the 

distinctive features, or points of significant contrast. The entire taxonomic apparatus, 

consisting of segregate labels, must be provided in this instance by myself, the analyst. 

Given, then, by the children, is the following set of tokens: roller skates, bicycle, car, 

mustang, tricycle, chair, monkey, seagull, airplane, dragger. In addition, the riddles 

provide the following distinctive features: wheels, pedals, legs. Yet as the theme of 

locomotion is explored and developed, one routine begetting another, one senses that 

underlying this contemplative kind of performance there lurks a fairly rigorously 

organized taxonomic structure. 

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The chart given below presents one possible taxonomy of the semantic domain of 

locomotion capable of accounting for the riddles in our corpus. This chart is truly the 

product of a collective effort, first on the part of the children, whose verbal interaction 

created the corpus, and second, on my own part, in creating a feasible taxonomic 

environment for their empirical observations. Whether this chart or one like it resides in 

the children's consciousness or subconsciousness is an issue entirely beyond the scope 

of my judgment. 

 

We have here a folk taxonomy focused on the semantic domain of locomotion. 

While the taxonomy is obviously not exhaustive, it is equally obviously highly 

structured and logically ordered within its chosen realm. There are several tiers to the 

taxonomy, connecting the tokens at the most particular level to the unique beginner at 

the most general. Segregate categories delimit the relationships of exclusion and 

inclusion obtaining in the taxonomy. Criterial attributes distinguishing the members of 

a single segregate category are provided immediately above the tokens. 

The logical relationships inherent in the children's riddling and captured 

(hopefully) in this taxonomy can be isolated through a distinctive feature analysis of the 

segregate categories. With reference to a small number of critical variables, each 

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segregate category exhibits either a positive or negative value. The constellation of such 

values should be unique in each case. Here is the entire set of contrasts: 

animals   toys   machines furniture 

+legs  -legs  -legs  +legs 
-wheels +wheels +wheels -wheels 
-pedals +pedals -pedals -pedals 
+mobile +mobile +mobile -mobile 

We can readily perceive some of the differences between folk and scientific 

taxonomy. The folk taxonomy is adapted to practical purposes, while the scientific 

taxonomy attends rigorously to all of the phenomena within its ken. The practical 

orientation of the folk taxonomy emerges from the following children's riddle: 

What’s the difference between a loaf of bread and an elephant? 
Response: I don’t know. 
Catch: I won’t send you to the grocery store for bread.  
 

The classification system contained in folk taxonomies sustains basic cultural 

competence even at the most mundane level. The folk taxonomy is a working 

taxonomy, facilitating, as Goodenough observes (see above), culturally acceptable 

action. Scientific taxonomy, on the other hand, seeks to make explicit the structure of 

semantic domains beyond the scope of any ordinary utility. Thus in this example the 

children need not be concerned with marginal cases such as the wheelchair, nor with 

the exceptional status of skates which are toys but lack pedals. In point of fact, 

disc1epancies of this nature are particularly conducive to true riddles with metaphoric 

content, as we shall see below. 

Nonetheless, the taxonomy presented here is not unscientific. In their grouping 

of tokens the children have suggested a structure transcending what Levi-Strauss calls 

"classification at the level of sensible properties" (1966:15). The taxonomy sketched in 

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above rests on the union of form and function. Wheels, legs, and pedals are not 

casually, but causally, related to locomotion; they are the empirically available markers 

of specific modes of locomotion. Legs correlate with self-generated motion; pedals, with 

mechanical motion based on the expenditure of human energy. Wheels without pedals 

entail in most cases some exterior source of energy. These distinctive features go 

beyond mere empiricism, by linking external form or anatomy to function. The 

formulation of such a taxonomy, emerging as it does in the arena of verbal play, is no 

mean or trivial task. 

In the analysis thus far, we have viewed the children in their structuring persona, 

dwelling rather methodically in the course of the riddling session on the order 

prevalent within their cognitive systems. We have seen a diverse collection of material 

objects, some commonplace, others exotic, systematically compared and contrasted, on 

the basis of a very few criterial attributes. Children’s play across the whole spectrum of 

verbal and non-verbal genres exhibits this ordering facet, and one might speculate that 

without the informal, entertaining format provided by the ludic genres, children might 

acquire only with great difficulty the fundamental cognitive and interactional abilities 

required of adults in their society. Indeed, the practice gained in the arena of children's 

folklore would appear to be a critical aspect of the enculturation process. 

Resting our case here, however, with the ordering facet of children's play, would 

be a grave mistake. There is present in most children's folklore an opposite tendency, 

and this too contributes vitally to the enculturation process. Returning to our riddling 

corpus, we find two routines which are extraordinary in that they depart from 

transparent questioning procedures and involve, whether intentionally or not, linguistic 

ambiguity. These two routines, #2 and #6, tend to subvert the very same taxonomy 

being developed in the other riddles in our corpus. As with the proverbial sand castle, 

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the children no sooner become adept at building a structure, than they learn to 

dismantle it. 

The notions subversive to our taxonomy appear in the guise of metaphor, in both 

cases involving a single word with two rather different referents. The metaphor 

resurrects a prior logic, the logic which enabled in the first place the extension of a 

single morpheme to two referents. This logic of the metaphor, however, stands apart 

from the organizing logic of the taxonomy. One of these metaphors comprises the block 

element of the only true riddle in the corpus: 

What has 4 legs and can't walk?  
A chair. 

In the context of the other routines, legs serve as a distinctive feature, setting the 

category animals apart from toys and machines. As we have seen, this feature has both 

formal and functional cogency in the folk taxonomy represented in our corpus of 

riddles. In this metaphor, however, the legs of a person or animal are analogized to the 

legs of a chair on formal grounds only, since the chair’s legs are not correlated to the 

chair’s mobility. The metaphor thus proposes another logic, one at variance with the 

logic of the taxonomy. Or to put the matter differently, the metaphor proposes another 

taxonomy, one in which legged furniture and animals would be subsumed together 

under a single rubric constituted on the basis of the shared feature (+legs). This 

metaphor is subversive precisely because it broaches the possibility of alternate slicings 

of the experiential world. Other, ghostly, taxonomies flicker into existence, challenging 

momentarily the taxonomy under elaboration.  

The other metaphor resides in the word mustang, which names both a type of 

horse and a car model, tokens which are cognitively separated in the taxonomy into the 

segregates animal and machine respectively. These tokens are cognitively conjoined in 

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this metaphor, which proposes a grouping of diverse tokens united in their fleetness, or 

what we might refer to as locomotive expertise. As in the previous example, this 

metaphor throws into relief an alternative taxonomy, knitting some of the same tokens 

into a quite different logical structure. The children are evidently at that watershed 

point in their development, in which they become aware of the dual potencies of 

language, to render shared cognitive structures, and to rearrange these structures into 

alternative forms. Each of these processes is adequately reflected in our riddling 

sample. 

It is noteworthy that the conventional taxonomy, with its solid foundation on 

formal and functional equivalence, prevails over the alternate taxonomies lacking as 

substantial a footing. The metaphorical connections remain pale and fleeting, in the 

context of the more highly elaborated taxonomy of locomotion. In fact, we tend to 

measure the departure of each metaphor using the locomotive taxonomy as a standard. 

Thus, the leap of metaphor between the segregates furniture and animal is long indeed, 

since these two are dominated by the generic node in the taxonomy. The segregates 

animal and machine, on the other hand, momentarily aligned in the word mustang, are 

dominated by a lower node in the taxonomy. This latter metaphor consequently covers 

less cognitive distance. In this fashion the deviant visions of taxonomy actually 

reinforce the standard taxonomy, at least in the riddling corpus under consideration 

here. We might adduce from this fact that the children who produced these riddles are 

still primarily rooted in the utilitarian facet of language, the potency of language to 

render shared cognitive structures. Later, as their riddling and other verbal expertise 

develops, they will acquire the notion that language is in reality a human tool, equally 

capable of clarification and obfuscation. 

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A few pages back, I alleged that both the ordering and disordering facet of 

children's folklore, and riddling in particular, have great consequence in the process of 

enculturation. Concerning this point, Ian Hamnet observes as follows: 

Classification is a pre-requisite of the intelligible ordering of experience, but if 
conceptual categories are reified, they become obstacles rather than means to a 
proper understanding and control of both physical and social reality. The ability 
to construct categories and also to transcend them is central to adaptive learning. 
(1967, 385) 

We have in the riddling sample herein treated an exemplification of precisely the point 

made by Hamnet. Cognitive skills central to the mastery of culture, "the ability to 

construct categories and also to transcend them," are fostered in the enjoyable format of 

children's riddling. 

In the way of a conclusion, I will simply tie up some of the loose ends left 

hanging over the preceding pages. William Bascom has noted that in some settings 

"riddles serve as a didactic device to sharpen the wits of young children" (1954:294). The 

overall thrust of this paper has been to illustrate with concrete data this observation 

which has become fairly conventional in folkloristics. But the present exemplia further 

illustrates the nature of wits and what might be involved in the sharpening of them. We 

are concerned here with cognitive skills associated with the classification of the tokens 

of experience; with the capacity to articulate shared cognitive structures, and the 

complimentary capacity to transcend these. In this context, riddling may indeed be 

viewed as a didactic mechanism, conducive to experimentation with received notions of 

order, and elaboration of novel cognitive orders. Riddling as an enculturating device 

allows children to work through the dual vectors of language, towards order and 

towards anti-order, in a stimulating and enjoyable social context. In riddling, at various 

stages, children learn to formulate culturally acceptable classifications; to articulate 

classifications at variance with cultural conventions; and finally to assess language and 

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indeed classification as arbitrary instruments reflecting only partially the continuous 

texture of experience. 

We can perhaps anticipate yet another great humanistic wave, the discovery of 

the cerebral child. Levi-Strauss in particular introduced us to the cerebral savage, whose 

primitive speculation represents another, not an inferior, science (Levi-Strauss 1966). 

The time may be ripe to turn our humanistic energies to those savages among us, and 

recognize at our very portals the cerebral child, concerned in his verbal routines with 

complex matters of rationality, sociability, and aesthetics. Certainly in the riddling 

corpus discussed above we find prolonged contemplation of a cognitive field, 

transpiring in a format conducive to artful speech and dependent on some degree of 

social harmony. Crossing the triviality barrier, we readily perceive the consequential 

nature of children's verbal play. A folkloristics of enculturation must be developed to 

fully investigate the place of children's folklore in the persistence and modification of 

culture. 

Finally, returning to the Chicano children who produced this riddling corpus, we 

must inquire into their choice of semantic fields. The field of locomotion is a most 

interesting one, and the content patterning within this field even more so. In the first 

place, the environment in which the riddling transpires exerts considerable influence on 

content to be included. We were surrounded by cars and bicycles and airplanes, as one 

generally is in the urban setting. Through the process of scene incorporation, these 

tokens found their way into the riddling. It is of interest that other tokens, far removed 

from the interaction, also turn up, such as monkeys, seagulls, skates. The classification 

begins with the familiar and expands outward to encompass the exotic.  

The basic antinomy established in the riddling might well be the contrast 

between animals and machines. At the very least, this topic could be said to be one of 

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the central concerns evinced in the riddles. This antinomy is of course crucial in the 

context of modern, industrial society, in which the machines rather than our animal 

brethren surround us with animistic contrast to ourselves. This development may well 

be all the more intensified among Central Texas Chicanos, who have very recent 

pastoral roots, but currently reside primarily in urban environments. James Fernandez 

remarks that in urban industrial settings children play at being machines, while in 

pastoral settings children play at being animals (1974). The folk taxonomy presented in 

this paper, straddling as it does both the pastoral and mechanical universe, may well 

reflect the transitional status of the Chicanos, and indeed, our entire society, between a 

rural past, reflected in oral tradition, and an urban present. Would it be possible to 

suggest that the children, in this riddling session, are working through basic 

contradictions in their cultural apparatus, in much the same fashion as primitives 

examine apparent contradictions through the logical tool of mythology, to borrow the 

diction of Levi-Strauss? (See Levi-Strauss 1963.) 

While the suggestion might seem a bit far-fetched, I would like to leave it on the 

books for corrective purposes. Certainly, to argue that the riddling considered in this 

paper constitutes a symposium on matters of conscious and subconscious concern to 

the children, does less violence to scholarly countenance than to assert that these 

materials are trivial and of no consequence to social science at all. As the pendulum 

shifts from the extreme position characteristic until recently, which dismissed much of 

children's folklore as inconsequential, we will come to an accurate understanding of the 

proper place for these materials within the science of man. 

John Holmes McDowell, professor emeritus at Indiana University, works at the confluence of 
language and culture in US and Latin American settings. His research topics range from the 
verbal play of children, in Children’s Riddling (IU Press, 1979); to Mexico’s ballad tradition, 
the corrido, in Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico’s Costa Chica 
(University of Illinois Press, 2000) and ¡Corrido! The Living Ballad of Mexico’s Western 

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Coast (University of New Mexico Press, 2015); to the mythic consciousness of Andean peoples, 
in Sayings of the Ancestors: The Spiritual Life of the Sibundoy Indians (1989) and "So 
Wise Were Our Elders": Mythic Narratives of the Kamsá (1994), both published by the 
University Press of Kentucky. Lately, he is collaborating with the Diverse Environmentalisms 
Research Team (DERT) to explore the concept of ecosovereignty, in Performing 
Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change (University of Illinois 
Press, 2021, co-edited with Katey Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy). 

 

References Cited 

Abrahams, Roger. 1973. “Rituals in Culture.” Unpublished Manuscript.  

Abrahams, Roger and Alan Dundes. 1972. “Riddles.” In Folklore and Folklife, edited by 
Richard Dorson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Bascom, William. 1954. “Four Functions of Folklore.” Journal of American Folklore 
67(266): 333-49. https://doi.org/10.2307/536411 

Blacking, John. 1961. “The Social Value of Venda Riddles.” African Studies 20: 1-32. 
https://doi.org/10.1080/00020186108707124 

Fernandez, James. 1974. “The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture.” Current 
Anthropology 15(2): 119-45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2740989 

Georges, Robert and Alan Dundes. 1963. “Toward a Structural Definition of the 
Riddle.” Journal of American Folklore 76(300): 111-118. https://doi.org/10.2307/538610 

Goodenough, Ward. 1957. “Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics.” In Report of the 7th 
Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Study, edited by Paul Garvin. 
Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.  

Hamnet, Ian. 1967. “Ambiguity, Classification and Change: The Function of Riddles.” 
Man 2(3): 379-92. https://doi.org/10.2307/2798727 

Huizinga, Johan. 1950. Homo Ludens. Boston: Beacon Press. 

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. 

---. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

McDowell, John. 1974. “Interrogative Routines in Mexican-American Children's 
Folklore.” Texas Working Papers in Sociolinguistics 20 (30 pages). Austin, TX.   

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Piaget, Jean. 1965. The Moral Judgement of the Child. New York: Free Press. 

Roberts, John, M.J. Arth, and R.R. Buch. 1959. “Games in Culture.” American 
Anthropologist 61(4): 597-605. https://www.jstor.org/stable/667148 

Roberts, John and Brian Sutton-Smith. 1962. “Child Training and Game Involvement.” 
Ethnology 1(2): 166-85. https://doi.org/10.2307/3772873 

Sanches, Mary and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. 1971. “Child Language and 
Children’s Traditional Speech Play.” Texas Working Papers in Sociolinguistics 5. 
Austin, TX. [Reprinted in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ed. (1976), Speech Play: 
Research and Resources for the Study of Linguistic Creativity, pp. 65–110. Philadelphia: 
University of Pennsylvania Press.] 

Sturtevant, William. 1972. “Studies in Ethnoscience.” In Culture and Cognition: Rules, 
Maps, and Plans, edited by James P. Spradley. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing 
Company.  

Sutton-Smith, Brian. 1967. “The Role of Play in Cognitive Development.” Young Children 
22(6): 360-70. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42720714 

---. 1972. “A Developmental Structural Account of Riddles.” Unpublished Manuscript. 

---. 1970. “Psychology of Childlore: The Triviality Barrier.” Western Folklore 29(1): 1-8. 
https://doi.org/10.2307/1498679 

 

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CHILDREN'S 
HAN DC LAPS 

 Informal Learning in Play 

REPUBLISHED Children's Folklore Review 
2024

Originally Published by
Southwest Educational Development Laboratory 

Austin, Texas 

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Brandon Barker
Rectangle

Brandon Barker
Sticky Note
Completed set by Brandon Barker

Brandon Barker
Rectangle

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Produced by Southwest Educational Development 
Laboratory, a private nonprofit laboratory with some 
programs supported in part by funds from the National 
Institute of Education, Department of Health, Education, 
and Welfare. The opinions expressed in this publication do 
not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the National 
Institute of Education, and no official endorsement by the 
National Institute of Education should be inferred. 

© 1978, Southwest Educational Development Corporation 

Copyright on these materials is claimed only during the period of 
development, testing, and evaluation, unless authorization is granted by 
the National Institute of Education to claim copyright also on the final 

�aterials. For information on the status of the topyright claim, contact
either the copyright proprietor or the National Institute of Education. 

Origianlly Printed in U.S.A. 
Austin, Texas 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Page 
I. Introduction.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 

II. Handclaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 

Ill. The Teacher's Role in Handclapping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 

IV. Teaching Procedures . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 
A. Students as Teachers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 
8. Teacher and Groups of Non-Handclappers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 

V. Basic Clapping Patterns .................................................... 1 o
A. Up-Down Handclap Pattern ............................................... 1 0 
8. Right-Left Handclap Pattern ............................................... 12 

VI. Handclaps with Texts, Music, Instructions ................................... 13 
A. Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 
8. Billy Boy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 
C. Mommy, Mommy, I Feel Ill (Tiny Tim) ....................................... 19 
D. Playmate ............................................................... 22 
E. My Sailor ............................................................... 24 
F. When Sally Was a Baby .................................................. 27 

VII. Building the Repertoire of Handclaps ....................................... 29 
A. Candy on A Stick ........................................................ 30 
8. Take Me Out to the Ball Park .............................................. 30 
C. My Momma, Your Momma ................................................ 31 
D. Improvisations ........................................................... 31 

VIII. Handclaps in Today's Schools .............................................. 33 
A. Cultural Variation ........................................................ 33 
8. Individual Variation ....................................................... 33 
C. Relevance to Concepts of Learning ........................................ 34 

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Brandon Barker
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Brandon Barker
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

This publication is one result of research in chil­
dren's play and folklore conducted by the Southwest 
Educational Development Laboratory during 1974-
1976. During this period, the Children's Folklore Com­
ponent of the Early Elementary Program conducted its 
research into handclapping under a grant from the Na­
tional Institute of Education, U.S. Department of 
Health, Education, and Welfare. The Laboratory would 
like to credit Robert S. Randall, Director of the Early 
Elementary Program; Richard Bauman, Laboratory 
Staff Associate; and Beverly J. Stoeltje, Folklore Con­
sultant and author. 

James H. Perry 
Executive Director 

Southwest Educational Development Laboratory 

I. INTRODUCTION

Richard Bauman 

The handclaps presented in the pages that 
follow represent a form of children's folklore, 
the traditional formalized play activities of chil­
dren that are engaged in and maintained by the 
children themselves, within the peer group. 
Familiar genres of children's folklore include, 
besides handclaps, riddles, games, jokes, 
taunts, retorts, counting out rhymes, ring plays, 
jump-rope rhymes, and many other forms, 
some of which go back to remote antiquity and 
have parallels that span vast portions of the 
world. 

Children's folklore forms are display forms, 
public means for the presentation and repre­
sentation of oneself and one's culture to others 
in ways that underscore both their meaningful­
ness to the group and one's own competence 
as a member of it. The forms of children's 
folklore are the special traditionally shared 
means for displaying one's competence to and 
with others, subject to evaluation for the skill 
and effectiveness of the performance-the 
most artful and valued ways of speaking and 
behaving in the children's peer group reper­
toire. As such, children's folklore is an index to 
what is important to children in the peer group, 
and their communicative competence within it. 

This work is presented in the conviction that 
children's folklore, representing what might 
aptly be called the indigenous art forms of child­
hood, unquestionably valued and enjoyed by 
the children themselves, can constitute a 
significant resource in the development of 
culturally responsive educational programs. 
The author, Beverly Stoeltje, has singled out 
handclaps as an especially interesting and 
attractive part of the children's folklore 
repertoire, in an effort to make them accessible 
and useful to teachers. The children, given the 
chance, will do the rest. 

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II. HANDCLAPS

Beverly J. Stoeltje

H_an?clapping, a traditional children's activity 
of singing and clapping in rhythm, brings two 
or more c�ildre� together in face-to-face per­
formance involving music, poetry and motion. 
Children who do handclaps are engaged in a 
cooperative artistic act which nurtures social 
verbal and motor skills. (See Section VIII c f�r 
further detail.) While these universal features 
a�e characteristic of all handclapping, cultural­
differences are exhibited in handclapping 
styles. These differences contribute to the un­
�imited variations which can be incorporated 
into th_e basic form. And further, this activity
establishes a common ground for children from 
�e_terog�neous backgrounds to meet and par­
t1c1pate in an activity from the world of children 
(See Section VIII, A and B for elaboration.) 
Handclaps, like other folklore forms, thus repre­
sent an important potential resource for 
educators. 

Texts 

For those of you familiar with handclaps, per­
haps fr?m your own childhood, or perhaps from 
observing students, you may only need to see 
the texts of the individual handclaps to remem­
ber _ the tunes and motions. Others may be 
curious to see the words in print as they are 
often difficult for the non-handclapper to com­
prehend due to the rapidity with which hand­
clapping is performed. For these reasons, the 
tests are presented initially as a group. 

Following these texts you will find the pro­
cedur_es for teaching the handclaps to a group
and six examples complete with texts music 
and teaching instructions. Additional texts fol­
low, including some improvisations which 
demonstrate children's experimental use of 
language. 

And finally, some further discussion on hand­
claps in the schools is inciuded which will aid in 
understanding the relevance of this activity to 
the children of today. 

Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack 

Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack 
All dressed in black, black, black 
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons 
All down her back, back, back. 

She asked her mother, mother, mother 
For fifteen cents, cents, cents 
To watch the elephant, elephant, elephant 
Jump over the fence, fence, fence. 

He jumped so high, high, high 
He touched the sky, sky, sky 
And didn't come down, down, down 
'Til the Fourth of July, ly, ly. 

She cannot read, read, read 
She cannot write, write, write 
But she can smoke, smoke, smoke 
Her daddy's pipe, pipe, pipe. 

Billy Boy 

When Billy Boy was zero 
He learned to be a hero 
Hero yoka, hero yoka 
Half past zero, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was one 
He learned to suck his thumb 
Thumb yoka, thumb yoka 
Half past one, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was two 
He learned to tie his shoe 
Shoe yoka, shoe yoka 
Half past two, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was three 
He learned to climb a tree 
Tree yoka, tree yoka 
Half past three, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was four 
He learned to shut the door 
Door yoka,door yoka 
Half past four, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was five 
He learned to swim and dive 
Dive yoka, dive yoka 
Half past five, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was six 
He learned to pick up sticks 
Sticks yoka, sticks yoka 
Half past six, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was seven 
He learned to climb to heaven 
Heaven yoka, heaven yoka 
Half past seven, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was eight 
He learned to shut the gate 
Gate yoka, gate yoka 
Half past eight, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was nine 
He learned to cut a vine 
Vine yoka, vine yoka 
Half past nine, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was ten 
He learned to say the end 
End yoka, end yoka 
Half past ten, cross down. 

Tiny Tim (Variation of Mommy, Mommy,
I Feel Ill) 

Miss Lucy had a baby, she named him Tiny 
Tim. 

She put him in the bathtub to see if he could 
swim. 

He drank up all the water, he ate up all the 
soap. 

He tried to swallow the bathtub but it 
wouldn't go down his throat. 

Miss Lucy called the doctor, Miss Lucy called 
the nurse. 

Miss Lucy called the lady with the alligator 
purse. 

In walked the doctor, in walked the nurse. 
In walked the lady with the alligator purse. 

Out walked the doctor, out walked the nurse. 
Out walked the lady with the alligator purse. 

Playmate 

Say, say, oh, playmate 
Come out and play with me 

And bring your dollies three 
Climb up my apple tree 

Slide down my rain barrel 
Into my cellar door 

And we'll be jolly friends 
For ever more more, more more more. 

So sorry playmate 
I cannot play with you 

My dollies have the flu 
And we might catch it too 

I have no rain barrel 
I have no cellar door 

But we'll be jolly friends 
For ever more more, more more more. 

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My Sailor 

My sailor went to sea sea sea 
To see what he could see see see 
But all that he could see see see 
Was the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea. 

My sailor went to chop chop chop 
To see what he could chop chop chop 
But all that he could chop chop chop 
Was the bottom of the deep blue chop chop 

chop. 

My sailor went to China 
To see what he could China 
But all that he could China 
Was the bottom of the deep blue China. 

My sailor went to oowasheewash 
To see what he could oowasheewash 
But all that he could oowasheewash 
Was the bottom of the deep blue 

oowasheewash 

When Sally was a Baby 

When Sally was a baby, a baby, a baby 
When Sally was a baby, she went like this 
Ummmm, this-a-way, ummmm, that-a-way, 
Ummmm, this-a-way, one-two-three. 

When Sally was a schoolgirl, a schoolgirl, 
a schoolgirl, 

When Sally was a schoolgirl, she went like 
this: 

Two plus two is four, four plus four is eight, 
Eight plus eight is sixteen, sixteen plus 

sixteen is thirty-two. 

When Sally was a teen-ager ... 

When Sally was a wife ... 

When Sally was a mother ... 

When Sally was a grandmother ... 

When Sally was a skeleton .. 

When Sally was a nothin .. . 

Candy on a Stick 

Candy on a stick makes me sick. 
Makes my stomach go two four, six. 

Not 'cause it's dirty, not 'cause it's clean. 
Just 'cause I kissed a boy behind a magazine. 

Girls, girls, have some fun. 
Here comes Johnny with a miniskirt on. 

He can wibble, he can wobble, he can do all 
that stuff 

But I bet he can't do this. 

Close your eyes and count to ten. 
If you mess up, start it over again. 

One, two, three, four, five, 
six, seven, eight, nine, ten. 

Take Me Out to the Ball Park 

Take me out to the ball park. 
Take me out to the crowd. 

Buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks 
I don't care if we never get back, so it's 

Root, root, root for the home team. 
If we don't win, it's a shame, cause it's 

One, two, three strikes you're out at the 
Old Ball Game. 

My Momma, Your Momma 

My momma, your momma, live across the 
street 

Eighteen-nineteen Marble Street 

Every night they have a fight and 
This is what they say. 

Boys are rotten just like cotton 
Girls are dandy just like candy 

Akawasaboos, akawasaboos 
Akawasasodawater, I love you. 

I Wish I Had a Nickel 

I wish I had a nickel 
I wish I had a dime 
I wish I had a boyfriend 
To kiss me all the time. 

My mother gave me a nickel 
My father gave me a dime 
My sister gave me a boyfriend 
Who kissed me all the time. 

My mother took my nickel 
My father took my dime 
My sister took my boyfriend 
And gave me Frankenstein. 

He made me scrub the kitchen 
He made me scrub the floor 
And when he wasn't looking 
I kicked him out the door. 

Have you Ever, Ever, Ever 

Have you ever, ever, ever in your long­
legged life 

Seen a long-legged sailor and his long­
legged wife? 

No, I never, never, never in my long-legged 
life 

Seen a long-legged sailor and his long­
legged wife. 

Have you ever, ever, ever in your short­
legged life 

Seen a short-legged sailor and his short­
legged wife? 

No, I never, never, never in my short-legged 
life 

Seen a short-legged sailor and his short­
legged wife. 

Have you ever, ever, ever in your pigeon­
toed life 

Seen a pigeon-toed sailor and his pigeon­
toed wife? 

No, I never, never, never in my pigeon-toed 
life 

Seen a pigeon-toed sailor and his pigeon­
toed wife. 

Have you ever, ever, ever in your bow­
legged life 

Seen a bow-legged sailor and his bow­
legged wife? 

No, I never, never, never in my bow-legged 
life 

Seen a bow-legged sailor and his bow­
legged wife. 

Down by the River 

Down by the river, down by the sea. 
Johnny broke a bottle and blamed it on me. 

I tole Momma, Momma tole Poppa 
Poppa tole Johnny he was gonna get a 

H-O-T-T-T

Miss Sue from Alabama 

Miss Sue, Miss Sue 
Miss Sue from Alabama. 
They call her hickory stick, oh yeah. 
They call her hickory stick, oh yeah. 

Miss Sue, Miss Sue 
Miss Sue from Alabama. 
They call her hickory stick, oh yeah. 
They call her hickory stick, oh yeah. 

(Monica),* somebody's callin' your name. 
(Monica), somebody's playin' your game. 
(Monica), somebody wants you on the tele-

phone. 
Tell 'em I'm not home. 

* Name of one handclapper

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Miss Sue, Miss Sue 
Miss Sue from Alabama. 
They call her hickory stick, oh yeah. 
They call her hickory stick, oh yeah. 

Miss Sue, Miss Sue 
Miss Sue from Alabama. 
They call her hickory stick, oh yeah. 
They call her hickory stick, oh yeah. 

(Renee),** somebody's callin' your name. 

** Name of other handclapper 

(Renee), somebody's playin' your game. 

(Renee), somebody wants you on the tele-
phone. 

Tell 'em I'm not home. 

Miss Sue, Miss Sue 
Miss Sue from Alabama. 
They call her hickory stick, oh yeah. 
They call her hickory stick, oh yeah. 
They call her hickory stick, oh yeah. 
They call her hickory stick, oh yeah. 

THE TEACHER'S ROLE IN 

HAN DC LAPPING 

The sound of singing, clapping children takes 
on special meaning for you as a teacher when 
you observe that the participants are learning 
interactional behavior, expressing creativity, 
utilizing syncopated rhythm, and "doing" 
poetry. In recognition of the important fact, 
however, that the formal and informal contexts 
for learning may utilize different processes, 
some principles are outlined below to assist 
you in teaching this play activity. 

Handclaps are traditional, folkloric play and 
therefore they may be performed with wide 
variation in stylistic features. Your effectiveness 
in facilitating this activity will be increased by 
giving special consideration to these variations 
which may be influenced by cultural back­
ground,* exposure to the form, age, or partici­
pant interaction. 

Age Range 
When a child learns to do a handclap is 

largely determined by when the opportunity 
arises. Therefore, some kindergartners may be 
able handclappers while some fourth graders 
may be totally unfamiliar with the activity. Hand­
clapping is of interest generally, however, to 

* See Cultural Variation, p. 33 .

children between the ages of 5 and 12 years. 
You may determine your students' familiarity 
with handclapping by demonstrating a hand­
clap and inquiring if any of the students know 
how to do it or some other handclap. The 
casual demonstration is important in communi­
cating exactly what you mean. It is well to re­
member that some handclaps are more com­
plex than others. (A notation is made for each 
handclap included here as to its appropriate­
ness for beginners or for accomplished hand­
clappers.) 

Context for Learning 
Children learn handclaps with the greatest 

ease if they learn from each other in an informal 
setting. This method should be encouraged if 
there are several children capable of teaching 
others. Shy children may respond to a teach­
er's suggestion that a specific child can show 
how handclaps are done, on a one-to-one 
basis. If the teacher is also a participant on 
occasion, both as teacher and learner, uncer­
tain children will be encouraged to learn. 

However, for classes in which the majority of 
children do not know handclaps, a method is 
suggested here, "Teacher and Group of Non­
handclappers," which can be used for teaching 
a group, or preferably, small groups, by a more 

formal method. Once the activity is familiar, a 
more informal environment can be reestab­
lished for learning further handclaps. 

"Doing" Handclaps 

As children clap together they exchange vari­

ations and create new ones, increasing their

own possibilities for artistic expression. When

laughter and giggles occur or negotiations take

place in the midst of a handclap, the partici­

pants are exploring variations in their play,

learning patterns of social cooperation, and 

attending to the physical maneuvers of the 
performance. Humor is an important charac­
teristic for both you and the children, for laugh­
ter emphasizes the play element so important 
to the success of this activity. 

In your role as teacher you may stimulate 
and encourage this play-learning known as 
handclaps by introducing the activity, directing 
attention to it, assisting children in acquiring the 
ability to handclap, and demonstrating appre­
ciation for the children's performance of the 
activity. 

TEACHING PROCEDURES 

1. You the teacher should learn to do a
simple handclap before introducing the
activity to the children. (Notations are
made in the instructions for each hand­
clap as to its difficulty.)

2. Listen to the accompanying cassette tape
to familiarize yourself with tunes and
rhythms.

3. Remember that children learn this activity
faster than adults.

4. Be prepared to laugh, and expect laughter
from children, when you make mistakes
as all learners do.

5. If you remember handclaps from your
own childhood, teach in the style which
is comfortable for you. A. Students as Teachers

Determine whether your students are familiar

with handclapping, by inquiring and simulta­

neously demonstrating informally. 

When a student indicates familiarity with

handclapping, you may ask the child to demon­

strate "doing" a handclap with you or with a

friend who also indicates familiarity with the

activity. 
You may then arrange the children in pairs,

a competent handclapper with a nonhandclap­

per, encouraging both the "teacher" and 

"learner." 
More direction from the teacher may be 

needed if social barriers inhibit the natural in­

formal context. 

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If your students' style differs from the in­
structions included here or from your own, it is 
equally "correct" as long as it works. 

B. Teacher and Group of Non-Handclappers
For the class in which handclapping is un­

familiar to the majority, you may organize small 
groups and demonstrate with one child, or pos­
sibly "borrow" a child from another class, or 
bring in another adult to demonstrate hand­
clapping. 

1 . With the attention of the class or a small 
group of the class, demonstrate a simple hand­
clap, such as Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,
singing the words or playing the tape: 

Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack 

Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack 
All dressed in black, black, black 
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons 
All down her back, back, back. 

She asked her mother, mother, mother 
For fifteen cents, cents, cents 
To watch the elephant, elephant, elephant 
Jump over the fence, fence, fence. 

He jumped so high, high, high 
He touched the sky, sky, sky 
And didn't come down, down, down 
'Til the Fourth of July, ly, ly. 

She cannot read, read, read 
She cannot write, write, write 
But she can smoke, smoke, smoke 
Her daddy's pipe, pipe, pipe. 

2. The second step is teaching the clap pat­
tern. The clap pattern for Miss Mary Mack,
Mack, Mack is based on the Up-Down Pattern, 
(see p.10). Practice these hand motions with 
your children, clapping slowly at first, and then 
with increasing speed as students demonstrate 
competence. 

3. Teach the one-two (in musical terms, two­
four) rhythm pattern. Clap your hands or tap a 
pencil on a desk in rhythm while counting aloud: 
"one, two, one, two." At first, practice accenting 
the "one" count. Then repeat the counting, 
accenting the "two" count. (Some verses ac­
cent the first syllable in a line, others accent 
the second syllable.) 

4. Walking in a line or a circle, continue clap­
ping as above, walking in step with the "one, 
two" rhythm. 

5. Select a simple handclap, such as Miss
Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, teaching the words 
of one verse, one line at a time, without clap­
ping. Repeat the words in rhythm, stressing 
the accented syllable. (In the example below, 
the second syllable is accented, placing the 
stress on the "two" count.) 

Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack 

' / ' bl' k All dressed in black, black, ac 

With silver buttons, buttons, buttons 

/ I I I 

All down her back, back, back 

6. Say the rhyme and clap on the accented
syllable only. 

7. Then clap your hands on every syllable,
stressing the accented syllable, clapping also 
in the blank spaces (where there is a beat but 
not a word). 

_ , _ , - , - , 

Miss Ma ry Mack __ Mack __ Mack
- I - / - I - I 

All dressed in black __ black __ black 
- I - I - I - I 

With sil ver buttons __ buttons __ buttons 
- / - ,  - I - I /

All down her back __ back __ back __ 
,, 

8. When students are familiar with clapping
their own hands in rhythm with the words, re­
view the basic clap pattern taught earlier, and 
combine it with the words in the rhythm, chant­
ing the simple tune on page. 

9. When students are familiar with clapping
to the first verse, teach the words to the remain­
ing verses for as long as their attention is en­
gaged. When the children are learning addition­
al handclaps, many of the above procedures 
may be dropped as the children will be familiar 
with the clap pattern, rhythm, and accents. 

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BASIC CLAPPING PATTERNS 

The two clapping patterns used as the basis 
for the following handclaps are illustrated be­
low. Either of the patterns may be used for any 
of the handclaps. Afro-American children more 
commonly use the Up-Down pattern while 
Anglo children seem to prefer the Right-Left 
pattern. 

Many handclaps add variations to the basic 
pattern. These variations are described with 
the individual handclaps. It is important to re­
member that the clap variations, like the words, 
may vary from one group to another, or from 
one week to the next. Through these variations, 
cultural differences and individual creativity are 
expressed. Children may occasionally disagree 
on specific items of the form, but they are usu­
ally able to resolve the differences themselves. 

The coding system used to describe the two 
basic clap patterns is consistent throughout. 
Variations are described with the handclap in 
which they appear. 

Both you and your children will find it easier 
to learn these basic clap patterns before learn­
ing specific handclaps. 

A. Up-Down Handclap Pattern

Description: This move begins with the left 
hand extended from the waist, palm up, and the 
right arm raised above the head, hand ex­
tended forward, palm down. When the partner's 
hands are in the same position, clapping be­
gins. Hands are brought together in the up­
down (U-D) position at the mid-body for the 
clap. Then partners clap both (B) of the other's 
hands in vertical hand position; then partners 
clap their own (0) hands together. This com­
pletes the pattern, and it begins over again. 

(U-D) Up-Down together (clap) 

(B) Both partners' hands vertical (clap)

(0) Own hands (clap)

The wide space of the U-D position is not 
usually maintained throughout the clap be­
cause of rapid movement. There are three 
basic moves in the patterns: U-D, 8,0. 

Among Afro-American children especially, 
the wide up-down position is often used as a 
signal to another child that one wishes to do a 
handclap. 

Up-Down Handclap Pattern 

(U-D) Up-Down, wide space (U-D) Up-Down together (clap) 

(B) Both partners' hands vertical (clap) (0) Own hands (clap)

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8. Right-Left Handclap Pattern

Description: This pattern begins by clapping 
one's own hands, (0), then partners clap right 
hands (R), clap own hands again (0), partners 
clap left hands (L), and then it begins over 

again. Variations generally come before or after 
the basic pattern. This pattern is somewhat 
simpler for some children because it does not 
involve the up-down position. There are bas­
ically four moves in this pattern: 0, R, 0, L. 

RIGHT-LEFT PATTERN 

(0) Clap own hands (R) Partners clap right
hands

(0) Clap own hands (L) Clap left hands

HANDCLAPS WITH TEXTS, 
MUSIC, INSTRUCTIONS 

A. Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack

Short and simple, this handclap is based on 
a chant and utilizes the cross down movement 
at the beginning of the clapping. Features of 
special interest are the repetition of the same 
rhythm pattern in each line and the repetition 
of the last word of each line. This dominance 
of repetitive forms contributes to facility in 
learning the handclap and to the creation of 
new verses. It is recommended for beginners. 

Complete Text 

Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack 
All dressed in black, black, black 
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons 
All down her back, back, back. 

She asked her mother, mother, mother 
For fifteen cents, cents, cents 
To watch the elephant, elephant, elephant 
Jump over the fence, fence, fence. 

He jumped so high, high, high 
He touched the sky, sky, sky 
And didn't come down, down, down 
'Til the Fourth of July, ly, ly. 

She cannot read, read, read 
She cannot write, write, write 
But she can smoke, smoke, smoke 
Her daddy's pipe, pipe, pipe. 

Rhythm 

The rhythm is based on the one-two rhythm 
pattern. The accent falls on the second syllable 
in the line through the entire handclap. 

Accented beat: I Unaccented beat: -
Beat without a word __ 

Clap own hands in rhythm with the words. 

- 1 - / - / - /
Miss Ma ry Mack __ Mack __ Mack 

- I - I - I - /
All dressed in black __ black __ black 

- / _  I - I - I
With sil ver buttons __ buttons __ buttons 

- I - / - I - 1  I I 
All down her back __ back __ back ___ _ 

Clapping Pattern 

Either the up-down or right-left pattern may be 
clapped here. The clap begins with cross­
down; however for beginning handclappers 
clapping own hands twice may be substituted. 
(See Bi/ly Boy for illustration of cross down.) 

Right-Left 

C cross (hands on own shoulders) 
D down (slap hands on thighs) 
0 own hands 
R right hands 
0 own hands 
L left hands 
0 own hands 
R right hands 

(Repeat above four times for each verse, once 
for each line, with two claps at the end.) 

Up-Down 

C cross 
D down 
UD up-down 
B both 
0 own 
UD up-down 
B both 
0 own 

(Repeat above four times for each verse, once 
for each line, two claps at the end.) 

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Miss 
I I I Ma ry Mack / Mack Mack 

C d 0 r 0 I 0 r 
C D UD B 0 UD B 0 

I I I All dressed in black black black 
C d 0 r 0 I 0 r 

C D UD B 0 UD B 0 

Wlth 
I I I sil 

-

I 

ver buttons buttons buttons 
C d 0 r 0 I 0 r 

C D UD B 0 CD B 0 

AIT 
I I I down her back 

-
back back 

C d 0 r 0 I 0 r 0 0 ·C D UD B 0 UD B 0 0 0 

Expansions 

In addition to the repetition of words and 
rhythms, this handclap rhymes the second and 
fourth lines and utilizes exaggeration in the 
character of the elephant who jumps to the sky, 
both features important in poetry. 

B. Billy Boy

This handclap is sung to the familiar tune of

I Am a Pretty Little Dutch Girl. Its theme is a

Cross 

child's growing-up from age zero to ten years.
The variation move, Cross Down, is pictured
(page below). The movement is rapid, in
rhythm with the one, two count. This is recom­
mended for beginners after learning at least 
one other handclap. 

When Billy Boy was zero 
He learned to be a hero 
Hero yoka, hero yoka 
Half past zero, cross down. 

Down 

___ ______

I 

___

___

___

___

-

-

-

-

___-

___-

___-

___-

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The following materials are presented in a 
pattern consistent with the "Teaching the 
Handclaps" procedure. Thus the verse is pre­
sented with the accents marked, then the clap 
pattern is combined with the words, and finally 
the complete text is presented. 

Rhythm 

The beat may be counted out as "one, two, 
one, two." In the first two lines the accent falls 
on the second syllable of the line. In lines three 
and four the accent falls on the first syllable. 
Beats are marked as follows: 

Accented beat: I Unaccented beat: -
Beat without a word __ 

In all handclaps, one-syllable words may be 
divided to match the rhythm, and two syllables 
are occasionally joined together in one beat. 

(If you find it comfortable to sing the words 
you should do so; if not, the tune may be added 
after teaching the clap pattern. The clap pattern 
should be taught before clapping the words.) 

Clap own hands, accenting the clap on the 
accented syllable as follows. 

- /_ / - / - /
When Bil ly Boy was ze ro __ 

I - / _ / _ / -

He learned to be a he ro __ --• 
/ - / - / - / _
He ro yo ka, he ro yo ka 

/ - / - / - / 
Half __ past __ zero, cross down. 

(At the beginning of a new verse the accent 
shifts again to the second syllable. There is no 
pause between verses.) 

Clapping Pattern 

When children have mastered clapping in 
rhythm with the words, the clap pattern may be 
introduced in combination with the words and 
rhythm. 

At the end of each verse are the words 
"cross down." The motion which accompanies 
these words is demonstrated in the photo­
graphs (p. 15 ). On the word "cross," cross 
arms over chest with hands on own shoulders; 
on the word "down," slap both thighs with own 
hands. This is a rapid movement in rhythm with 
the one-two beat, and no beats should be lost 
before beginning the next verse. 

Either of the basic clap patterns may be used 
for this handclap. 

Right-Left 

0 own hands 
R right hands 
0 own hands 
L left hands 
CD cross down 
(repeat pattern seven times plus OR and 
cross down for each verse) 

Up-Down 

U-D up-down (horizontal clap) 
B clap both partner's hands (vertical) 
0 own hands 
CD cross down 
(repeat basic pattern 1 O times plus cross 
down for each verse) 

Rhythm, Words, Clap Pattern 

/ / I I 

When Bil ly Boy was ze ro 
0 r 0 I 0 r 0 I 

ud b 0 ud b 0 ud b 
/ / - /

/ -
he ro He learned to be a 

0 r 0 I 0 r 0 
0 ud b 0 ud b 0 

I
ud 

I 

/ 

/ 

ka ka, he ro yo He ro yo 
r 0 I 0 r 0 I 0 

0 ud b 0 ud b 0 ud 

/ / / 

-

Half past zero, cross down. 
r 0 I 0 r C 

b 0 ud b 0 C 

Complete Text 

Though only one version of each verse is 
presented here, children may vary the verbs 
and nouns throughout the verses, always rhym­
ing with the age in the verse. For example, in 
the last verse Billy Boy may learn to chase a 
hen, rhyming with ten. 

When Billy Boy was zero 
He learned to be a hero 
Hero yoka, hero yoka 
Half past zero, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was one 
He learned to suck his thumb 
Thumb yoka, thumb yoka 
Half past one, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was two 
He learned to tie his shoe 
Shoe yoka, shoe yoka 
Half past two, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was three 
He learned to climb a tree 
Tree yoka, tree yoka 
Half past three, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was four 
He learned to shut the door 
Door yoka, door yoka 
Half past four, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was five 
He learned to swim and dive 
Dive yoka, dive yoka 
Half past five, cross down. 

0 

b 

_

-

-

/ 
/ 

_

_ _

_
-

-

-

-

-

-

-

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When Billy Boy was six 
He learned to pick up sticks 
Sticks yoka, sticks yoka 
Half past six, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was seven 
He learned to climb to heaven 
Heaven yoka, heaven yoka 
Half past seven, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was eight 
He learned to shut the gate 
Gate yoka, gate yoka 
Half past eight, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was nine 
He learned to cut a vine 
Vine yoka, vine yoka 
Half past nine, cross down. 

When Billy Boy was ten 
He learned to say the end 
End yoka, end yoka 
Half past ten, cross down. 

Expansions 

In its content, Billy Boy moves progressively 
from age zero to age 1 O, providing a familiar 
c?ntext in which the participant may increase
hrs understanding of sequencing at the same 
time as giving order to the concept of growing 
up. 

Verbal structures focus on rhyming and uti­
lize the particular rhyme pattern: abba, (zero, 
hero, hero, zero), familiarizing the child with 
poetic forms. Competence in the use of word 
order is increased by means of the changing 
nouns and verbs in each verse. 

The two rhythmical structures in each verse 
(accenting the first syllable, accenting the sec­
ond syllable), increase the performer's aware­
ness of rhythm, both in language and in body 
movement. 

Beginners learn this one quickly. 

C. Mommy, Mommy, I Feel Ill

The common experience of childhood illness
forms the subject of this handclap which is 
chanted without a tune. The accent is on the 
first syllable of the line, and the rhythm is the 
familiar one-two pattern. Simple to learn and 
popular because of its simplicity and familiar 
theme, it is especially good for beginners. 

Mommy, Mommy, I feel ill 
Send for the doctor over the hill. 

In came the doctor, in came the nurse 
In came the lady with the alligator purse. 

Out went the doctor, out went the nurse. 
Out went the lady with the alligator purse. 

Rhythm 

Clap own hands in one-two rhythm, accenting 
the first syllable of each line. 

/ - / _ / _ / -
Mom my Mom my I feel ill _ 

/ - / _ / - / -
Send forthe doc tor o verthe hill _ 

Words and Clap Pattern 

/ / -

Mom my Mom my 
0 R 0 L 

UD B 0 0 

/ I 

Send forthe doc tor 
0 R 0 L 

UD B 0 0 

/ / 

In camethe doc tor 
0 R 0 L 

UD B 0 0 

/ - / - / / 
In camethe doc tor in camethe nurse  _  

I _  I _  I _ / _ 
In camethe lady withthe alli gator purse _ 

I - / _ / - / -
Out wentthe doc tor out wentthe nurse _ 

I - / - / - I -

Out wentthe lady withthe alli gator purse -·

Clapping Pattern 

When students are familiar with clapping out 
the rhythm and words, include the clap pattern. 
Either basic clap pattern may be used. There 
are no variation moves in this clap. 

Right-Left 

0 own hands 
R right hands 
0 own hands 
L left hands 
(repeat twice for each line) 

Up-Down 

UD up-down 
B both hands 
0 own hands 
0 own hands 
(repeat twice for each line) 

/ I 

I feel ill 
0 R 0 

UD B 0 

/ 

/ 

0 verthe hill 
0 R 0 

UD B 0 

/ 

in camethe nurse-
0 R 0 

UD B 0 

L 
0 

L 
0 

L 
0 

_ 

-

-

-

/ 

_

_

_

_ 

_ 

_ 

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/ / 

In camethe lady withthe 
0 R 0 L 
UD B 0 0 

/ 

wentthe 
/ 

Out doc tor 
0 R 0 L 
UD B 0 0 

/ / 

Out wentthe lady withthe 
0 R 0 L 
UD B 0 0 

Variations 

Children vary this handclap at the beginning 
of the line rather than the end. Here they 
change the actor and action of the sentence, 
leaving the object (the rhyming words) the 
same. For example: 

I don't want the doctor, 
I don't want the nurse, 
I don't want the lady 
With the alligator purse. 

They may be encouraged to create their own 
variations if you point out these opportunities 
for variation. 

_______ the doctor 
________ the nurse 
_______ t�l�y 
_______ the purse 

/ 

alli gator purse 
0 R 0 L 
UD B 0 0 

/ 

wentthe out nurse 
0 R 0 L 
UD B 0 0 

/ 

alli gator purse 
0 R 0 L 
UD B 0 0 

A slightly different variation of this handclap is 
known as Tiny Tim. 

Miss Lucy had a baby; she named him Tiny 
Tim. 

She put him in the bathtub to see if he could 
swim. 

He drank up all the water; he ate up all the 
soap. 

He tried to swallow the bathtub but it wouldn't 
go down his throat. 

Miss Lucy called the doctor, Miss Lucy called 
the nurse. 

Miss Lucy called the lady with the alligator 
purse. 

In walked the doctor, in walked the nurse. 
In walked the lady with the alligator purse. 

Out walked the doctor, out walked the nurse. 
Out walked the lady with the alligator purse. 

_ _ _ 

__ 

__ 

__

_ 

-

-

-/ 

/ / / 

-

-

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D. Playmate

A very popular handclap, especially among 
accomplished handclappers, this one has been
adapted from the popular song, Playmate and
is sung to that tune. Movement variations are 
illustrated in the photographs below. The addi­
tional verses at the end of this section provide
an example of children's creative efforts in 
constructing new interpretations using basic
patterns.

Say, say, oh, playmate 
Come out and play with me

And bring your dollies three
Climb up my apple tree

Slide down my rain barrel
Into my cellar door

And we'll be jolly friends 
For ever more more, more more more.

Rhythm 

The rhythm is the one-two pattern with the
accent on the second syllable.

Swing {S)

Clapping Pattern 

The beginning move is a swing (S) in which
partners hold both hands, one partner holding 
palms up, fingers curled over, the other partner
holding palms down, fingers curled (see photo­
graph). The movement is from side to side 
then up to clap own hands. Variations in m�ve­
ment are clapping backs of both hands (BH),
coupled with clapping both hands vertically, 
palms together. {B). These two moves replace
the two swings after the first series of move­
ments.

S Swing
S Swing 
0 clap own (0) hands
R right hands (R)
0 own (0) hands
L left {L) hands 
0 own (0) hands
0 own (0) hands 
BH clap backs of both hands (BH)
B clap both hands vertically (B)
0 

R 

0 

L
0 

0 

. ·.•:t;.:. .. ����-�- . -"'"""!!�� .. :-

:. . :: .. ··.:• .. �
. ·---�:·�-•

Backs of both hands (BH)

Rhythm and Clap Pattern 

/ / 

Say Say oh play 
s s 0 R 

I I 

Come out and play 
BH B 0 R 

I-

And bring your dol
BH B 0 R

I - I

Climb up my ap
BH B 0 R

I - I

STTde down my rain
BH B 0 R 

I - I 

1n to my eel 
BH B 0 R 

I I 

And we'll be jol 
BH B 0 R 

I I 

For 
-

ev er more 
BH B 0 R 

Additional Verses 

So sorry playmate 
I cannot play with you 
My dollies have the flu 
And we might catch it too
I have no rain barrel 
I have no cellar door 
But we'll be jolly friends 
For ever more more, more more more

/ I 

mate 
0 L 0 0 

with 
I / 

me 
0 L 0 0 

I I 
lies three 
0 L 0 0 

I I 
pie tree 
0 L 0 0 

I I 
barrel 

0 L 0 0 

I 

/ 

lar door 
0 L 0 0 

I / 
ly friends 
0 L 0 0 

I / I I 
more more more more. 

0 L 0 B B B 

Say, say, oh, vampire 
Come out and bite with me
And bring your fangs three
Climb up my spookie tree
Slide down my blood vein
Into my coffin door 
And we'll be jolly friends 
For ever more, n1ore, more more more.

__ 

__ 

__ 

__ 

__ 

__ 

__ 

__ 

__ 

__ 

__ 

__ 

__ 

__ 

__ 

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

__ 

__ 

__ 

-

-

-

I 

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E. My Sailor

In My Sailor words are used in linguistic play 
and motions are demonstrated which express 
these words. These motions may be expressed 
in any form which is meaningful to the perform­
ers. Commonly found motions are included 
below in the photographs. 

Salute 

My sailor went to sea sea sea 
To see what he could see see see 
But all that he could see see see 
Was the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea. 

My sailor went to chop chop chop 
To see what he could chop chop chop 
But all that he could chop chop chop 
Was the bottom of the deep blue chop chop 

chop 

My sailor went to China 
To see what he could China 
But all that he could China 
Was the bottom of the deep blue China 

My sailor went to oowasheewash 
To see what he could oowasheewash 
But all that he could oowasheewash 
Was the bottom of the deep blue 

oowasheewash 

My sailor went to eye eye eye 
To see what he could I I I 
But all that he could I I I 
Was the bottom of the deep blue 111 

My sailor went to love, love, love 
To see what he could love, love, love 
But all that he could love, love, love 
Was the bottom of the deep blue love, love, 

love. 

My sailor went to you, you, you 
To see what he could you, you, you 
But all that he could you, you, you 
Was the bottom of the deep blue you, you, 

you 

My sailor went to I love you 
To see what he could I love you 
But all that he could I love you 
Was the bottom of the deep blue I love you 

Clapping Pattern 

The variations in motion are expressions of 
the last words in each line, and are performed 
in accompaniment with the singing of those 
words. Thus when the word is "sea, sea, sea," 
the performer salutes; when the word is "chop, 
chop, chop," the performer does a chopping 

Chop 

China 

motion on his/her own arm while singing the 
word, etc. These motions are described below 
as well as shown in the photographs. 

Sea,Sea,Sea 

S sea/see-place right hand on forehead 
as in a salute, repeat three times 

C chop-chop own left arm with right 
hand 

CH China-place both hands together 
under chin and slowly bend knees 

00 Oowasheewash-place hands on hips 
and wiggle while bending knees, down 
and up 

I Love You 

L 
y 

ILY 

I/eye-point finger to own eye or to 
body 
love-cross hands over chest 
you-point with finger to partner 
all three motions or simply hand over 
chest. 

Complete Pattern 

Sea,Sea,Sea 

0 R 0 L 0 s s s 

0 R 0 L 0 C C C 

0 R 0 L 0 CH CH CH 

0 R 0 L 0 00 00 00 

(Repeat each four times) 

Oowasheewash 

I Love You 

0 R 0 L 0 

0 R 0 L 0 L L L 

0 R 0 L 0 y y y 

0 R 0 L 0 ILY ILY ILY 

(repeat each four times) 

I I I

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Expansions 

The text of this handclap focuses on word­
play-homonyms and parts of speech. By re­
peating the same word in a different functional 
slot in the sentence, such as a noun in a verb 
slot and a verb in a noun slot, nonsense is 
created. This increases awareness of word 
recognition and parts of speech. 

The nonsense word, "oowasheewash," and 
the entire text of/ LOVE YOU are based on 
wordplay. The artistic form of the verse makes 
it possible for a child to perform wordplay with 
sentence structure before encountering the 

concept formally. The child's language skills 
are expanded and formal concepts made fa­
miliar through verbal play. 

Expressing a verbal concept through motion, 
as each of the movement variations does, pro­
vides a vehicle for comprehension of word 
sense as the performer demonstrates the 
meaning of the word in the performance. 

Mastering this handclap thus involves sever­
al sensory modalities-acting out concepts, 
creating nonsense in words and sentences, 
and coordinating a variety of physical motions 
with another person in rhythmical form. 

F. When Sally Was A Baby

The performers sing through an entire life 
cycle from baby to the grave in this ancient and 
very popular song. Its basic feature is the acting 
out of the role in each verse: thumb sucking for 
a baby, kissing and hugging for a wife, etc. The 
motions and the words vary with the particular 
group of children, expressing their own percep­
tions of roles and rhythms. 

The forms below may be considered a model 
from which the children may add or subtract 
or alter. They may add other roles such as 
aunt or teacher, they may change the name 
Sally to another name or to/, various people 
may die before Sally herself, and she may go to 
heaven and shout. The choice of motion to be 
demonstrated for each role and how it wil► be 
acted out is associated with the child's image of 
that role and the ability to express that image 
within the artistic form. In some versions the 
"ummm this-a-way" is replaced by descriptive 
words as in the second verse below; in others 
it provides an accompaniment for a motion 
without descriptive words as in the first verse. 

Baby 

Mother 

Grandmother 

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Motion 

thumb sucking motion, 
body sways in rhythm to 
"this-a-way, that-a-way" 

motion is replaced by words 

Verse 

When Sally was a baby, a baby, a baby 
When Sally was a baby, she went like this 
Ummmm, this-a-way, ummmm, that-a-way 
Ummmm this-a-way, one, two, three. 

When Sally was a schoolgirl, a schoolgirl, a schoolgirl, 
When Sally was a schoolgirl, she went like this, 
Two plus two is four, four plus four is eight, 
eight plus eight is sixteen, sixteen plus sixteen is thirty-two 

When Sally was a teen-ager ... 

When Sally was a wife ... 
When Sally was a mother ... 

When Sally was a grandmother ... 

When Sally's husband died .. . 

When Sally was a skeleton .. . 

Another version utilizes the rhythmical phrase, 
"0000, aah, cha, cha, cha," and always ex-

Verse 

When Mary was a baby 
A baby, a baby 
When Mary was a baby 
She went 0000, aah, cha, cha, cha. 

When Mary was a teen-ager, 
A teen-ager, a teen-ager, 
When Mary was a teen-ager, 
She went 0000, aah, cha, cha, cha. 

When Mary was a teacher .. . 

When Mary was a mother .. . 

When Mary died ... 

Clapping Pattern 

Either the up-down pattern or the right-left pat­
tern may be used. The clapping continues 
through the singing. Clapping does not continue 
through ooo, aah, cha, cha, cha or through 
Ummmm this-a-way. 

talks on phone or slaps knees 

kissing and hugging motion 
rocking baby motion 

bent over with an aching back 

hands over face 
shake arms loosely 

presses the role in action rather than words. 

Motion 

thumb sucking motion 

talks on phone or dances 

shakes finger 

rocks baby 

twists up face 

Up-Down Right-Left 

ud 0 
b R 
0 0 

L 

Building the Repertoire of Handclaps 

When handclapping is established as a 
familiar activity of informal play among children, 
new handclaps and variations on familiar ones 
are readily learned. The following texts are pre­
sented to expand the repertoire. It is likely that 
some children will already know many of them, 
and a reminder will be a sufficient stimulus to 
activate their performance. 

The same teaching procedures already pre-

sented can be applied to the following texts, 
and the two basic clap patterns, Up-Down and 
Right-Left, are used for these claps as well. 
The claps are sung or chanted on the accom­
panying tape. Notations are given here for 
significant variations. Where there is a clap 
without a word, a blank line has been included 
in the text. 

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A. Candy on a Stick

This verse is chanted without a tune. It is 
simple to learn and is very popular with begin­
ning handclappers. The boy's name is usually 
changed each time it is performed. Excitement 
is created in this handclap by the focus on male 
and female roles. The verse also provides 
practice in learning numbers. Counting by fives, 
tens, etc. can be substituted for the one to ten 
count. 

Candy on a stick --, makes me sick __, 
Makes my stomach go two-four-six--· 

Not 'cause it's dirty--, not 'cause it's 
clean __ , 

Just 'cause I kissed a boy behind a maga-
zine ___ 

Girls, __ girls, __ have some fun --· 
Here comes (Jimmy) with a miniskirt on. 

He can wibble, he can wobble, he can do all 
that stuff 

But I bet he can't do this --· 

Close your eyes and count to ten --· 
If you mess up, start it over again --· 

(eyes closed but still clapping) 

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, 

nine, ten 

B. Take Me Out to the Ball Park

The familiar popular song has been adapted 
to handclapping, which makes this one par­
ticularly easy to learn. Unlike most others, 
however, it is a one, two, three rhythm. This 
rhythm makes the up-down clap pattern a more 
effective one for this handclap. Unlike many 
others also, the clap begins on the accented 
beat. Though the tune is familiar, the unusual 
rhythm pattern can create difficulty unless it is 
learned slowly in the beginning. 

Take __ me out to the ball __ __ park ___ _ 
Take __ me out to the crowd __ __ _ ____ _ 

Buy me some pea nuts and crack __ er jacks ___ _ 
I __ don't care if we nev er get back, so it's 

root __ root root for the home __ __ team ___ _ 
If we don't win it's a shame __ __ --, cause it's 

one -- -- two____ three strikes you're out at the 
old____ ball____ game____ --· 

C. My Mama, Your Mama

From the name of the street in the beginning 
to the nonsense at the end, this verse lends 
itself to variation and is seldom performed 
exactly the same way. Collected from Afro­
American and Mexican-American groups of 
children, these two variations demonstrate 
cultural as well as individual patterns in the 
varying word choices. 

Either clap pattern is appropriate for this 
verse, though the right-left pattern is somewhat 
easier to learn with this one. The words are 
chanted. It begins on the accented beat and 
has a one-two rhythm pattern. 

My mama, your mama, live across the 
street __ 

Eighteen-nineteen Marble Street __ 
Every night they had a fight and 
This is what they say __ 
Boys are rotten just like cotton 
Girls are dandy just like candy 
Akawasaboos, __ akawasaboos __ 
Akawasasodawater, I love you. 

Si, si, si, si 
My mother, your mother, lives across the 

street 
Eighteen nineteen Cantebury Street __ 
Listen what they say __ 
Boys are rotten just like cotton 
Girls are honey made of candy 
No pizza pie, __ no pizza pie 
But a piece of bubble gum __ 
No pizza pie, __ no pizza pie 
But a piece of bubble gum. 

D. Improvisations

Some of the verses below are improvisations 
on recognizable tunes while others are newly 
created verses set within the rhythmical form 
of the handclap. They are included here as ex­
amples of children's experimentations with the 
elements of handclaps. 

I wish I was a apple hanging from a tree 
I wish somebody' d come and put his arms 

around me 
I wish I was a apple, a sweet apple. 
I am a sweet apple, I am a sweet apple. 

I am a watermelon, hanging from a sweet 
tree 

I know I am a sweet watermelon 
Sweet watermelon, sweet watermelon. 

Please don't eat me from the tree 
From the tree, from the tree. 
Just let me free, just let me free. 

I wish I was an apple hanging from the tree 
Hanging from the tree, hanging from the tree. 
Somebody come and eat me, eat me from 

the tree. 
Eat me, eat me to the bone 
eat me, eat me to the peeling 
peeling, peeling, peeling, peeling. 

My mother, your mother, live across the 
street 

That's so I can play just with you 
Not with nobody else, not with nobody else 
Just with you and me, say who 
Say who, say Ray. 

Mrs. Folly had a dolly 
A dolly who was sick, sick, sick 
She called a doctor to be quick, quick, quick 
The doctor gave her a rubber bed 
He wrote on a paper for a bill, bill, bill 
I'll be back in the morning with the pills, pills, 

pills. 

Si, si, si 

When Peter went to the circus 
And then when he saw some carrots, carrots 
He got inside the sto-ore 
He eat all the carrots. 

When he got sick and his mother said no 
You never better not eat no more 
Because you might die in your heart 
Because you know in the store, store, store. 

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Sí, sí, sí 
Cuando un turkey cuando 
Cuando la comieron-on-on 
Cuando la hicieron y la comieron 

Sí, sí, sí 
Georgie Porgie what he got 
He got a bicycle and he ride it a lot 
Then when he went and he fell down 
When he cried all up and down 
Then he went to call his mother 
His mother put in a, a bandaid 
When he went to ride it again 

And when he fell down again 
And when he fell down again 
And then when he fell down again 
And then he hurt hisself 
And then they take him to the doctor 
And then when they fixed him up he was 

alright 
And then buy him a little bicycle 
And then when he ride it he didn't fell down. 

Gimme me a nickel, gimme a dime 
I wanna see my honey bun all the time. 

HANDCLAPSIN 

TODAY'S SCHOOLS 

Handclapping, a traditional children's activity 
of singing and clapping in rhythm, brings two or 
more children together in a face-to-face event 
of artistic communication. In stimulating this 
form of play, you as teachers encourage the 
informal learning process. This process fo­
cuses on self-motivated learning through 
observation and experience in a child-directed 
environment. Social interaction and culturally 
distinctive behavior are fostered in the informal 
context. 

A. Cultural Variation

The environment which encourages the per­
formance of culturally learned artistic activity 
also nurtures the child's identity, both as an 
individual and as a member of a specific ethnic 
group. Particular cultural interpretations are 
reflected in the rhythmic, textual and kinesic 
elements of handclapping. For example, in 
Mexican-American culture groups handclaps 
generally begin with "si, si, si." Among Afro­
American groups the signal to begin handclap­
ping is nonverbal: the up-down clap position. 
Among Anglo-American children the intention 
to handclap is announced verbally, "Let's do 
the one .. . " 

Stylistic variations in doing handclaps will 
appear in the choice of words, in rhythms and 
their combinations, and in the way in which 
children arrange their space for handclapping. 
For example, Afro-American children are more 
likely than Anglo children to use nonsense 
words because of the stress in Afro-American 
culture on verbal art. Thus the sounds of the 
words themselves, a feature of the poetic use 
of language, may be of primary importance in 
word choice. Further, linguistic differences will 
be noted grammatically between different cul­
tural groups. Thus children from Spanish­
speaking cultures, those from Afro-American 
culture, and native speakers of English may 
use word order, tenses, and pronunciation 

quite differently, yet in accord with their own 
culture's standards for speech play. Recogniz­
ing the difference in a grammatical exercise 
and verbal play is an important distinction, for 
speech play encourages the poetic use of lan­
guage consistent with culture-specific stand­
ards rather than textbook grammar. 

Rhythmical patterns also vary from culture to 
culture. Therefore, it will be noted that Afro­
American children are more likely than Anglo­
American children to use syncopated rhythms 
in handclaps. The combination of the up-down 
pattern, which has three moves, with a one-two 
(2/4) musical rhythm, is an example of this 
syncopation. Afro-American children generally 
prefer this rhythm combination, and Anglo­
Americans generally use the right-left clap pat­
tern, based on two moves, in combination with 
the one-two (2/4) musical rhythm pattern. 

B. Individual Variation

Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget stresses that
learning is based on a process of discovery, 
construction, and re-invention. An "active 
methodology" in teaching makes available ap­
propriate materials with which the child may 
re-invent and thereby experience learning. 
(1972: 26-27). Handclaps are based on tradi­
tional materials-the formal patterns of rhythm, 
motion, and verse. The natural environment for 
handclaps is children's informal play. Charac­
teristic of handclaps is repetition of tune, move­
ment, words. Equally characteristic are the 
individual and cultural styles which combine 
with the formal elements to create infinite vari­
ations. The artistic, ritualized pattern of the 
activity provides familiarity while the variations 
create novelty. Each performance is a re-crea­
tion, different from every other one, depending 
on how it is enacted and by whom. 

Described by Erik Erikson as "playful ritual­
ization," play which is based on ritualized pat­
tern is inherently both personalized and tradi-

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tional, improvisational and formalized (1972: 
143). The participants .in such play experience 
a mutuality in performing the known materials 
together; yet there is a distinctiveness for each 
individual in the act of interpretation. 

Innovation is apparent in "Playmate" with 
the addition of children's verses to the original 
popular song. Within the verses individual 
choice determines whether children sing of 
"jolly" friends or "best" friends, of "cellar doors" 
or "jelly spoons." Different concepts of life and 
death are expressed in "Sally." For some chil­
dren Sally dies and becomes a "nothin'," and 
for others Sally dies, goes to heaven, and 
shouts. Each handclap performance thus con­
structs a living artistic event, based on formal 
patterns and given cultural and individual inter­
pretations by the performers. 

Through observation of these folkloric activi­
ties you may gain knowledge of your students' 
abilities which do not appear in a formal learn­
ing context. Children frequently exhibit pre­
viously unrecognized leadership qualities, lin­
guistic competence, and motivation in ritualized 
play. Possessing an understanding of these 
activities provides you with a set of tools by 
which you can informally nurture and evaluate 
children's ability to integrate their verbal, cog­
nitive, and motor capacities in an act of artistic 
communication. 

You may also discover that the overall ex­
perience of learning is enhanced through co­
operative artistic performance which engages 
the child's full attention and increases self­
assurance while encouraging social growth. 

C. Relevance to Concepts of Learning

Because no special equipment or space is 
required to handclap, it is a good activity for the 
playground, for rainy days in the classroom, for 
waiting in line, and for other settings which are 
not routinely structured. Teachers may also 
wish to consider how the formal elements of 
handclapping are related to concepts of formal 
learning. Some suggestions are listed below. 

Elements which relate to physical edu­
cation and music education are based 

especially on coordination of motion within a 
rhythmical pattern. These include hand-eye 
coordination, left-right discrimination, and mov­
ing in rhythm. Observational skills are devel­
oped in both the learning and performing of a 
handclap. Memory skills are combined with 
observational ones as the participants must 
remember a series of movements, words, and 
tunes to perform a handclap. The acting out of 
concepts requires comprehension of word 
meaning and the ability to express it in a mo­
tion. Children gain familiarity with music, both­
tune and rhythm, through the singing and 
chanting. And most important is the integration 
of skills which must be utilized simultaneously 
-mental, verbal, physical, musical-to perform
a handclap.

Concepts of formal learning which relate 
especially to the language arts, mathematics, 

and social sciences are revealed particularly 
in the texts of handclaps. Without conscious 
knowledge of the textual features, performers 
manipulate verbal and conceptual materials to 
achieve the overall effect. The interest of many 
texts depends on language play. In some cases 
the variation in each verse depends on the 
selection of a rhyming word to fill the slot of 
noun or verb which must change in each verse. 
In others, the same word is used repeatedly 
for all parts of a sentence, creating nonsense. 

In either of the above instances sentence 
structure is the focus of attention. Rhyme and 
meter are in constant use. Homonyms and 
synonyms are frequently employed. Ordering 
occurs both in counting out numbers and in the 
ordering of actions such as life cycles and nar­
ratives. Sounds and rhythms of words are used 
for their own sake, stressing both auditory dis­
crimination and the poetic use of language. 
Especially important in handclaps is the figura­
tive use of language. The words and motions 
serve the purpose of creating images, many of 
which are humorous or nonsensical, illustrating 
the importance of words to communicate ideas 
and actions. 

As the activity is mastered, participants apply 
the traditional form to the creation of new 
verses and to new handclaps based on tradi­
tional tunes, television commercials, popular 

songs and other familiar materials. Some new 
creations are refined through usage and be­
come a part of the larger repertoire while others 

are never incorporated. Yet all of the efforts 
engage the participants in mastering basic 
skills of communication within artistic play. 

REFERENCES 

Erikson, Erik, "Play and Actuality," Play and 
1972 Development, Maria W. Piers, 

ed. W.W. Norton & Co. New 
York. 

Piaget, Jean, "Some Aspects of Operations," 
1972 Play and Development. Maria 

Piers, ed. W. W. Norton & Co. 
New York. 

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CHILDREN'S 

HAN DC LAPS 
Informal Learning in Play 

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Part III  
 

Texas Children’s Folklore Project 
A Bibliography 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 



 



Children’s Folklore Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 · /doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39026/ 
 

A Bibliography of Publications Related to the 
Texas Children’s Folklore Project (TCFP) 

 
 

 

  
 

Richard Bauman publications relating to TCFP 
 
1971 “An Ethnographic Framework for the Investigation of Communicative    
   Behaviors.” ASHA 13(6): 334-340.1 
 
1975 “Preface.” In Black Girls at Play: Folkloric Perspectives on Child Development, by  
    Margaret Brady and Rosalind Eckhardt [full bibliographic entry below]. Austin:  
  Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. 
 
1977 “Linguistics, Anthropology, and Verbal Art: Toward a Unified Perspective, With   
  a Special Discussion of Children's Folklore.” In Linguistics and Anthropology,  
  Report of the 28th Annual Georgetown University Round Table Discussion on  
  Languages and Linguistics, 1977. Muriel Saville-Troike, ed. Washington, D.C.:  
  Georgetown University Press. 
 
1978 “Introduction.” In Children's Handclaps: Informal Learning in Play, by Beverly J.  
   Stoeltje [full bibliographic entry below]. Austin: Southwest Educational  
    Development Laboratory. 
 
1982 “The Ethnography of Children's Folklore.” In Children In and Out of School:  
   Ethnographic Perspectives in Education. Perry Gilmore and Alan Glatthorn.  
  Arlington: Center for Applied Linguistics.2 
 
 

Margaret Brady publications relating to TCFP 
 
1975  Black Girls at Play: Folkloric Perspectives on Child Development. Austin: Southwest 
  Educational Development Laboratory. (with Rosalind Eckhardt) 
 
 

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1978  “Peer Group Evaluation of Narrative Competence: A Navajo Example.” Texas  
    Working Papers in Sociolinguistics 4. Austin, TX.3 
 
1984  “Some Kind of Power”: Navajo Children’s Skinwalker Narratives. Salt Lake City:   
  University of Utah Press. 
 

John Holmes McDowell publications relating to TCFP 
 
1974 “Interrogative Routines in Mexican-American Children's Folklore.” Texas  
  Working Papers in Sociolinguistics 20 (30 pages). Austin, TX.   
 
1975   The Speech Play and Verbal Art of Chicano Children: An Ethnographic and  

Sociolinguistic Study.  University of Texas, Austin. Doctoral Dissertation. 
 
1976    "Riddling and Enculturation: A Glance at the Cerebral Child," Working Papers in  

Sociolinguistics 36 (16 pages).4 
 
1979   Children's Riddling. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 
 
1980    "Animal Categories in Chicano Children's Spooky Stories." In Folklore on Two  

Continents: Essays in Honor of Linda Degh, edited by Nickolai Burlakoff and Carl 
Lindahl, 169-75. Bloomington: Trickster Press. 

 
1980     "Hey Diddle Diddle, What's in a Riddle?" Center for Southern Folklore Magazine, 3:  

13. 
             
1982 "Sociolinguistic Contours in the Verbal Art of Chicano Children." In Spanish in the  

United States: Sociolinguistic Aspects, edited by Lucia Elias-Olivares and Jon  
Amaestae, 333-353. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.5 

 
1983 "Children's Folklore." In Handbook of American Folklore, edited by Richard Dorson,  

314-322. New York: McGraw-Hill. 
 
1988    "Speech Play." In The International Encyclopedia of Communications, edited by Erik  

Barnouw, New York: Oxford University Press.            

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1993 "Hispanic Oral Tradition: Form and Content." For the Handbook of Hispanic  

Cultures in the United States, edited by Francisco Lomelí, 218-25. Houston: Arte  
Publico Press. (With María Herrera-Sobek and Rodolfo J, Cortina) 

 
1994    "Riddle." In The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 7, edited by R.E.  

Ascher, 3578-580. Oxford: Pergamon Press.    
 
1995 "The Transmission of Children's Folklore," In Children's Folklore: A Source Book,  

edited by Brian Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. 
McMahon, 49-62. New York: Garland.6 

 
1999 “Play.” The New Book of Knowledge. Grolier, pp. 333-4. 
 
2008 “Naming Games and Beyond: Referencing in Children’s Verbal Play,” Children’s                     
   Folklore Review 30: 35-46.7 
 
2018 “Transitionality: The Border as Barrier and Bridge.” In Border Folk Balladeers:  

Critical Studies on Américo Paredes, edited by Roberto Cantú, 86-101. Cambridge:  
Cambridge University Press. 

 
Danielle Roemer publications relating to TCFP 

 
1977  A Social Interactional Analysis of Children’s Folklore: Catches and Narratives. Ph.D.  

dissertation in Folklore, University of Texas, Austin. 
 
1980    “Interjected Routines as Metanarrative Commentary.” Working Papers in  

Sociolinguistics 68 (39 page). Austin: Southwest Educational Development     
Laboratory.8 

 
1982 “Semantic and syntactic parallelism in children's Storytelling.” Working Papers in 
 Sociolinguistics 102 (29 pages). Austin: Southwest Educational Development  
  Laboratory.9 
 

 
 

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Beverly J. Stoeltje publications relating to TCFP 
 
1978  Children's Handclaps: Informal Learning in Play.  Austin, TX: Southwest 

Educational Development Laboratory.10 
 

 
1 A precursor, setting out the frame of reference that shaped the TCFP, this article was reprinted in Language and 
Cultural Diversity in American Education (1972), edited by Roger D. Abrahams and Rudolph Troike and published by 
Prentice-Hall.  
2 See the reprinted version of “Ethnography of Children’s Folklore,” here: doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39023. 
3 An updated version of this article was republished in 1980 as “Narrative Competence: A Navajo Example of Peer 
Group Evaluation” in Journal of American Folklore 93(368): 158–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/541010. 
4 "Riddling and Enculturation: A Glance at the Cerebral Child" was re-issued in Richard Bauman’s and Joel Sherzer’s 
(editors) Language and Speech in American Society: A Compilation of Research Papers in Sociolinguistics (1980, 
Southwest Educational Development Laboratory). See, also, the reprinted version of “Riddling and Enculturation” 
in this special issue: doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39024. 
5 This article also appears in the 1982 issue of Aztlán: Chicano Journal of the Social Sciences and the Arts 13(1-2): 
165 193. 
6 Children’s Folklore was reprinted by Utah State Press in 1999 and is available via Utah State’s Digital Commons. 
7 Available via the Children’s Folklore Review archives, here. 
8 PDF pending restoration; availability forthcoming via Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), here.   
9 Available online via Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), here.  
10 See the reprinted version of Children’s Handclaps in this special issue: doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39025. 

 

 

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https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/71/
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/cfr/article/view/25106/30980
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED199996
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED252062
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	1 - COVER - VOL 42
	2 - Blank page 1
	3 - Journal and Editor Info page
	4 - Blank page 2
	5 - Inside Title page
	6 - Blank page 3
	7 - Contents page
	8 - Blank page 4
	9 - From the Editor
	10 - Part I title page
	11 - Blank page 5
	12 - Bauman, Texas Childrens Folklore Project - A Retrospective
	13 - McDowell, On the Street with Austins Chicano Kids
	14 - Stoeltje, Play and the Performance of Children's Folklore
	15 - Part II title page
	16 - Blank page 6
	17 - Bauman, Reprint - Ethnography of Children's Folklore
	18 - McDowell - Riddling and Enculturation
	19 - Blank page 7
	20 - Children's Handclaps
	Steoltje, 1978, Children's Handclaps
	Steoltje, 1978, Children's Handclaps 11

	21 - Part III title page
	22 - Blank page 8
	23 - TCFP A Bibliography



