Abe Lincoln was a Good Old Man

Here's one sent in by Jason from Maryland, who learned it in the early 80s:

Abe Lincoln was a good old man
jumped out the window with his dick in his hand
said "scuse me, ladies, gotta do my duty
drop your drawers and give me some booty."

This seems to have spread around a lot - throwing Abe Lincoln into a rhyme almost always makes it funnier.

Some other similar Lincoln rhymes I've seen go

Abe Lincoln was a good old man
washed his face in a frying pan

and

Abe Lincoln was a good old soul
washed his face in a toilet bowl

I wouldn't presume to guess how old this is; folklorists probably would have left it out of their books up until the 1960s (before then, even Iona Opie, who was no prude, was referring to "unprintable" rhymes). But all of these rhymes sound like variations (in some cases changing only the name) of "Old Dan Tucker," one of the solid gold top hit songs of the 1830s:

Old Dan Tucker was a good old man
washed his face in a frying pan
combed his hair with a wagon wheel
born with a toothache in his heel


Bruce Springsteen recorded a rollicking, spirited version of the song on his wonderful We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions album. I assume that there were dirty verses going around by, say, the 1840s, though the word "booty" as a synonym for sex only goes back to about the 1920s. When Abe Lincoln started turning up in the song is probably anyone's guess; the idea probably came to some kid who heard the song at camp and spread from there. I would say that by the 1980s, most of the kids singing the lines above had never heard "Old Dan Tucker."

update: 2013:

Several comments indicate that a common ending to this (after "give me some booty") were a couple of lines that come up in a number of playground rhymes, including Old MacDonald Sitting on a Fence

When I die, bury me
hang my balls from a cherry tree.

 This connects it to much older rhymes (even older than "Old Dan Tucker,"  including an old folk/blues song known as "When I Die," which is included in a couple of early 20th century collections of such:

The Journal of American Folklore collected one like this from "mountain whites" in Tennessee in 1907:

When I die, bury me a tall
soak my body in alcohol
When I die, bury me deep
put a quart of liquor at my head and my feet

The same source traced another version to "Mississippi negroes" in 1908:

When I die, don't bury my at all
preserve my bones in alcohol

Another version collected from a similar source ("Mississippi negroes") around the same time went:

When I die, bury me deep
tell the gamblers I've gone to sleep
put a pair of bones in my right hand
and i'll throw seven in the promised land.

A similar version collected in Alabama in 1915 was the same as the above, with "bottle of booze at my feet" substituting for the second line.

You see variations on this in lots of blues songs, "Dying Crapshooter's Blues" by Blind Willie McTell comes right to mind (and I think he himself said he stole from all sorts of sources to make that song, which, itself, was similar to "St. James Infirmary Blues," which itself grew out of even older songs like "The Unfortunate Rake," "Streets of Laredo," etc).  So what we've got here is basically a progression of a 16th century British ballad growing into a playground rhyme sung to the tune of Andrew Lloyd Weber. There are entire books about how these particular songs grow into each other, including a couple at the right:

Now, it's easy to make the inference here, based on the above examples, that despite the dates, the "negro" version came first, as "bury me a tall" is clearly a corruption of "don't bury me at all." However, figuring out which came first, and who's appropriating from who, is just about impossible in these things. Those 19th/20th century folk and blues songs are just about the perfect example of a pure hybrid, as African rhythms mixed with European melodies. Since Pete Seeger died the other day, it seems like as good as time as any to mention that in 2000 I interviewed him over the phone on a radio show (my co-host, who'd been active in the folk world for ages, had his home phone number), and he said something about how the upside of our country's abominable racial history is that it gave us this hybrid music: "Sometimes the call it rock, sometimes they call it folk, or gospel, or blues, or jazz...."


Which versions did you hear, and when?