Camp Songs

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello there. This is Cindy in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Hello, Cindy. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Cindy.

Hello.

How can we help?

Well, it all started when I was a little kid. My mom taught me this nonsensical phrase sentence thing, and then she went on to teach it to my kids, and I was just wondering if you would have any idea where it would have come from.

Let’s hear it.

Okay.

Now backward.

Oh, dear God.

And what does that mean?

I have no idea. And she’s passed on now, so I can’t even ask her, you know, where she got it from.

Well, did she just walk into a room saying it, or were there certain occasions where she would bring this up?

Not really. We’d just be sitting around the kitchen table, and then one day she just started teaching me this phrase.

Let me ask you a question. Did you go to summer camp when you were a kid?

Yeah.

Did your mother go to summer camp when she was a kid?

I have no idea. Probably not.

A lot of our listeners right now are going, I know a version of that. Because it’s a fairly well-known camp song. Or something like it is kind of a camp song. You can find videos, and we’ll put them on the website. You can find videos of people singing something similar to this on YouTube. I know of at least a few.

But the thing is, they’re very different from each other. They all have something in common. They sound similar. They’re all nonsense. But they’re different because they’re folklore. They’re transmitted from mouth to ear, as I’ve said before. And so they tend to be corrupted and modified and changed.

Like yours starts with Ishkabibble. None of the other ones that I know start with Ishkabibble. And Ishkabibble has its own life as a word in slang and a word in dialect.

Yeah, I think the one I know is Achi Kachi Kumarachi Ua’a. It starts that way. And then it goes Ishkabibble.

Yeah, that’s it.

Yeah, I just found this online. Somebody is quoting a version of this camp song from the late 1960s. And his version, it’s all very long, but one part of it goes, Iten, diten, litle, doten, oaten, doten, little, doten, Itle, spiddly, oten, doten, bo, be, skidotten, doten, wa, doten, chew.

And it’s similar to what you’ve got, right?

Yeah, there are bits in it, yeah.

And I did a little bit of digging on this, and here’s what I found. I believe that I found a point of origin. I won’t say it’s the first use of it, but maybe a point of popularization.

There was a show on the radio in 1946 and 1947 about a character called Buddy Bear. It was a show written by a woman named Betty Berry, B-A-R-R-I-E. And this show and one of the episodes, you can find a description online that describes Buddy as speaking in scat. And he says, Bobo Skeditendaten.

Yeah, and so, and if you look that song up, you can find it in the copyright index from 1946. So she not only wrote it for the show, but then she copyrighted the song. And that’s the earliest, I mean, it’s really difficult to search for this kind of thing, but that is the earliest version of any variant of this that I can find, is this show called Buddy Bear from 1946 and 1947.

And my mom would have been about 10, 11 years old. She would have been camp age, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So anyway, there we go. There’s a little bit of history there, Cindy. I’m looking forward to the calls and emails we get about this song, because I’m quite certain that many of our listeners know a version of this. And by all means, recite the whole thing.

Oh, yeah. Call us and recite the whole thing in a voicemail. We’ll have fun with it.

Cindy, thanks for your question and performance.

Thank you very much.

Our pleasure.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You too.

If you’d like to tell us about your version of that camp song or some other nonsense song that you know, 877-929-9673, or spell it out in email if you can to words@waywordradio.org.