Hickory Smoke

This weekend, Jill took a train trip up to Seattle to visit friends. It was a lovely time -- Seattle is a great city, we saw Liz Miele do stand-up -- just a pleasant weekend all around.

However. Our friends have a three-year-old, and consequently much of the car music over the weekend was an album of nursery rhymes. On its own, that didn't bother me at all. I'm sure that by the nine hundredth thousandth millionth iteration the songs would get aggravating, but seriously -- I had no problem singing along with "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" to a toddler.

The problem was Hickory Dickory Dock. Which, to my horror, I found out I -- and by "I", I mean "everyone else" -- have been singing wrong my entire life.

Here are the core lyrics as I always sang them as a kid:

Hickory, dickory, dock

The mouse ran up the clock

The clock struck one

And down he runs

Hickory, dickory, dock.

Notice that "one" rhymes with "runs". Which makes sense for a nursery rhyme. It's great.

But here is how it was sung on the album (and further research suggests this is a more common iteration):

Hickory, dickory, dock

The mouse ran up the clock

The clock struck one

The mouse runs down

Hickory, dickory, dock.

 What is this? "One" does not rhyme with "down". It's not even close enough to be a slant rhyme, but it is just close enough to be horribly jarring and discordant and wrong.

Also, I disapprove of the melody the album chose. I think the first two bars of the song should go:

G-A-G-F-E-D-C

C-E-E-F-D-E

But what we got was:

F#-G-A-A-B-D♭-D

A-F#-G-A-A-B-D♭-D

And of course, Wikipedia suggests that's the traditional melody choice as well. What is wrong with all of you?

As you can imagine by the fact that I'm still writing about it, this is driving me absolutely nuts -- to the point that I saw a recipe for "hickory rubbed watermelon" yesterday and almost flew back into a rage. The whole word is ruined for me.