Playmate Come Out and Play With Me variations

Here's one my music teacher taught me:

Oh Playmate, come out and play with me
and bring your dollies three
climb up my apple tree
look down my rain barrel
slide down my cellar door
and we'll be jolly friends
for evermore!"

But here's the thing - it's not really a kids song, as it was written by an adult back in 1940. But it became so popular among kids as a "singing game" that it showed up in most collections of childrens folklore, with a few edits made for kids who didn't know what a rain barrel was:

See See Playmate, come out and play with me
and bring your dollies three
climb up my apple tree
Slide down my rainbow
into my cellar door
and we'll be jolly friends
for evermore!"

Rather than changing the line, my music teacher gave us a long talk explaining the rain barrel line. He said rain barrels were better for washing your hair than shampoo....some who were in the class contend that he said he didn't BELIEVE in shampoo, but preferred to just stick his head in rain barrel (I can't exactly vouche for that, but it sounds about right....the folklore about THAT guy could fill a book on its own). He also noted, in a rare moment of humor, that sliding down a cellar door usually led to serious splinters. This all hearkens back to an earlier day when looking down at a barrel of water was first class entertainment, I guess.

Anyway, though, the song lent itself to parody very well - I THOUGHT we were making parodies up, but the ones we came up with were virtually identical that the ones folklorists collected years before. Did someone in class know them, do the parodies just naturally suggest themselves, or are we in some sort of "universal mind/collecting unconscious" thing here?

Here's one collected in Sherman's book (at right) from Jerri, who heard it in Doraville, GA in 1972:

Vampire, come out and bite me
and bring your bats three
climb up my graveyard tree
slide down my tombstone
climb in my coffin door
and we'll be vampires
for evermore!

Another, more violent version from Bronner's book, circa 73:

Playmate, come out at play with me
and bring your tommy gun three
climb up my poison tree
drown in my rain barrel
fall down my cellar door
and we'll be enemies
for evermore!

At the same time, Iona Opie was collecting similar parodies in England:

Baby, I cannot play with you
Because I've got the flu
chicken pox, measles too
Flush down the lavatory
into the drain pipe
and that's the way they go - go -go

She also notes that versions ending in "for evermore" had the term "droopy drawers!" appended onto the end with a shout, and further notes that even the 1940 song was essentially a rewrite of an 1894 song (by an adult) called "I Don't Want To Play In Your Yard:"

I don't want to play in your yard,
I don't like you anymore
you'll be sorry when you see me
sldiing down our cellar door
you can't holler down our rain barrel
you can't climb our apple tree
I don't want to play in your yard
if you won't be good to me.

The tune was very different, but we end up with sort of a mobeus strip of a folk process here: going from one song, to another, to a parody that's pretty much the same thing as the original!