Flee Fly Flo Camp Song

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Beth Redmond-Jones from San Diego.

Hi, Beth. How are you doing?

Hello, Beth.

Good. How are you?

All right. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

What’s on your mind?

So, as a child, my mother and my grandmother used to say this little ditty to me, and it’s a little different, I think, than what you guys usually cover, but it went something like this.

Bobo ski watten dotten watten chh. Bobo ski watten dotten watten chh. Itten bitten watten totten. Itsy bitsy skuotten dotten. Bobo, ski, wat, and dot, and wat, and shh.

And they used to say this to us all the time when they’d be cooking or whatever, and it’s something my brothers and I learned, and I’ve been teaching it to my girls. But I have no idea where it came from, and my mother passed away a decade ago. My grandmother’s been gone a couple decades. So I was wondering if you guys had any insight.

Oh, my goodness. Well, first of all, congratulations. That was a beautiful rendition.

Beth, I have a feeling that Girl Scouts and former Girl Scouts everywhere are pounding their dashboard and tugging at their earbuds because it’s a camp song, like a call-and-response kind of song that little girls like to sing and, you know, patting their thighs and clapping their hands, one of those kinds of songs.

And there are lots of different versions of it, but the one I learned was Flea. Flea, fly. Flea, fly, flow. Flea, fly, flow. La vista. Kumulama, kumulama, kumulama, vista. A-chi-ca-chi-ku-ma-chi-u— Ish-k-di-le-op-n-bo-n-b-bi-bi-bi-dot-n-wot-n-tot-n-shh.

That’s great. Outstanding.

Thank you.

And I have that. I found that, a version of that. It’s called Flea Fly Flow.

Right.

And it’s in the folklore books.

Yes, yes.

Really?

And the thing about folklore that we often say on the show or children’s games is that it’s something that’s passed on from person to person. It’s mouth to ear rather than page to eye. And so there are lots and lots and lots of different versions, and I’m sure all those former Girl Scouts out there are saying, no, no, no, Martha, the song didn’t go that way. It goes this way.

There’s one that is a sort of jokey variation of that, which has to do with flea and fly and then mosquito and calamine, and the end of it is squishing the mosquito, that little shh.

I would say that it’s not just Girl Scouts who are responding. It’s anyone who went to summer camp.

Yeah, I went to summer camp. 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. I mean, this variants of this, Beth, have lasted so long. And it’s crazy. It pops up again and again and again on the Internet. People will be like, does anyone else know this? And people go, yeah, but my version’s like this. Or we didn’t use that line. We used this line.

But there’s one book that I would recommend to you if you want a little more about this. It’s called Camp Songs, Folk Songs. It was published in 2014. And it’s by a woman named Patricia Averill. And she’s got a section in there on the song that Martha just sang called Flea. She talks a little bit about her informants and has some variants on it. But she directly connects these kinds of nonsense songs to scat music, which really came into vogue in jazz and popular music in the 1920s.

And then you start to see it pop up in camp manuals of the songs that they’re teaching the kids. Or you see it come up in letters that people are writing home or memoirs and that sort of thing. I really think she’s making a really solid case that this kind of nonsense, pitter-patter, came out of two traditions. One, camp song traditions, which have been, they go back as far as camps go back. But also the scat kind of joining in and people needing the music in order to carry off this nonsense. And part of being the insider and proving that you belonged was mastering the song.

So, Beth, I guess our question for you is, did your mom or your grandmother go to camp, summer camp?

Not that I’m aware of. My grandmother was born right around 1900, and my mom was born around 1924, and they didn’t necessarily have the means to send my mom to camp to Girl Scouts. So it was never something that was part of my understanding of them growing up. They just said it was something they knew, and I had to learn. So I did.

It’s possible that also they learned it on the playground. It is something that you could do with rope skipping, or you might just do it with hand clapping. Like Martha was saying, there have been waves of traditions over the decades of young women teaching each other these really complicated clapping songs. And this also works as a clapping song, even outside of the camp environment.

Well, I know my mom was a big jump roper, so maybe she learned it from there. I wish she was still alive so I could ask her today.

Yeah, right? Those linguistic heirlooms.

Yes, exactly.

Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, sure. Our pleasure. Thanks for sharing the song. You want to sing it one more time for us?

Sure.

Bobo skiwotin dotin wotin chh. Bobo skiwotin dotin wotin chh. Ittin bitin wotin totin. Itsy bitsy skowotin dotin. Bobo skiwotin dotin wotin chh.

Nice. Thank you so much for indulging me.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye, Beth.

Thanks, Beth.

Yeah, here’s the one I was talking about. Flea, flea fly, flea fly mosquito. Calamine, calamine, calamine lotion.

Oh, no, no, no, not the notion, notion, notion. Itchy, itchy, scratchy, scratchy, got one on my backy-backy. Quick, get the bug spray. Think he went that-a-way.

Yeah, I’m counting here. I have eight different versions of it that I found. It’s just a little bit of searching. If you want to hear a little bit more about this, we also talked about this kind of rhyme in 2012. Just look for the word Bobo, B-O-B-O, on the website, and you’ll probably find it.

Call us with your linguistic heirlooms, 877-929-9673, or share them in email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.