pnArt

Many decades ago, when we were kids, my Mom used to sing us a song -

It’s three o’clock in the morning / I looked upon the wall

The spiders and the fireflies / were playing base-a-ball

The score was 5 to 2 / The spiders were ahead

I got so darned excited / I jumped right out of bed

I could still remember the tune perfectly as I sang it to my wife last night.    So today I set out to learn more about this song.   Who sang it?  Who wrote it?    It turns out to be 20th century example of folk music.

Googling for the lyrics I found dozens of variations.   Sometimes it’s three o’clock, sometimes it’s four o’clock or five o’clock.    My mother must have sweetened up the lyrics for us kids, because I found no other examples of fireflies.   In most of the songs the insects involved were bedbugs and something else - roaches, beetles, cooties (i.e., lice),  or mosquitoes (often “’squitoes” or “skeeters” to keep the rhythm).    I only found one other example of getting excited and jumping out of bed.    In all the other ones an insect hits a home run and knocks the singer out of bed.    The setting in my mother’s version was unspecified but in many of the ones I Googled it was jail.  Other times it was a shack, barracks, a tent, or just a bed at home.   A typical example:

Oh, five o’clock in the morning / I looked up on the wall –
The roaches and the bedbugs / Were having a game of ball
Oh, the score was six to nothing / The roaches were ahead –
The bedbugs hit a home run / And knocked me out of bed

The origins of the song are hazy.    The earliest reference I found was 1934.   My mother was a child of the Depression so that timing is right.   The lines are often cited as part of a camp song, usually with the title “A Jolly Bum” or “The Bum’s Song”.   When sung by folk singers it’s sometimes part of a song called “Portland County Jail”.    I also found mutiple versions in songs about Army life.   Almost all the performers I saw named were so obscure they don’t even appear in Rhapsody, which has an impressively large database.    The one exception is that two sources claim that Bruce Springsteen sang it at the Bridge School Benefit Concert of 28 Oct 1995 at Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA, but I couldn’t locate a recording of this.

This website has a collection of some variations:  http://rolandanderson.se/bedbugs.php

And here’s a discussion of “Portland County Jail” by a group of folksingers:  http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=8265

All of the references I found only described the lyrics, not the music.   Locating the tune was interesting.  On Rhapsody I searched for “o’clock in the morning”.  I found dozens of “Three O’Clock in the Morning” references.   This looked promising.  I clicked on one, which turned out to be an instrumental, but the tune was exactly what my mother sang!    Farther down the Rhapsody list I saw a version by the Andrews Sisters with the Glenn Miller Band.   I played it.  It was a love song about dancing the night away -  nothing to do with bugs playing baseball - but it had the same melody.       I also spotted a version by B.B. King.    Blues and county jails often go together so I played that.  No luck -  just a lonely man missing his woman, but also lacking bugs and sports.  In the end I listened to every vocal I could find with a promising title, but I never found anyone actually singing it.

If anyone reading this can locate a recording of those lyrics actually being sung, I’d be interested in hearing it.  Thanks in advance.

Finally.  We got a freeze last night.   The weather forecast gave fair warning so I took in the last of my basil yesterday and made pesto - mixing it with sun-dried tomatoes as I’ve learned to do in recent years.

While I ground and pureed the ingredients I watched the Patriots do the same to the Washington Redskins on TV.   Before the game there was anticipation about how the irresistible force of  New England’s league-leading pass offense would fare against the immovable object of  the Redskins’ league-leading pass defense.  The final answer to that philosophical conundrum was: irresistible force 52, immovable object 7.    The Boston Globe’s headline:  “Washington Slapped Here”

A few hours later my wife and I turned the TV back on to watch the Red Sox complete their sweep of Colorado in the 2007 World Series.   I was reminded again of why my interest in baseball has dissipated in recent years.    Near  the top of the 8th inning something came across the newswire about A-Rod leaving the Yankees.   And from then through the top of the ninth, all the Fox announcers could talk about was A-Rod’s contract.  The fact that there was a game going on in the background and the Rockies had pulled within a run of the Sox seemed like an annoyance to them (”Turn off that World Series  game - we’re trying to discuss baseball here!”)

I got more of the same driving to work this morning.   I had tuned in to a football-talk radio show (WEEI’s “Patriots Monday”)  not really expecting to hear much about the Patriots.  It’s understandable that Beantown is all a-twitter about the Red Sox winning the World Series.  But during my commute the whole conversation was about  Mike Lowell’s free-agency and whether the Sox should sign A-Rod, and how much they should spend to buy or retain this player or that.   If the game had anything to do with a bat, a ball, and bases, instead of lawyers and bank accounts, you’d never know it from that show.