Miss Susie facts for kids

"Miss Susie had a steamboat", also known as "Hello Operator", "Miss Suzy", "Miss Lucy", and many other names, is the name of an American schoolyard rhyme in which each verse leads up to a rude word or profanity which is revealed in the next verse as part of an innocuous word or phrase. Originally used as a jump-rope rhyme, it is now more often sung alone or as part of a clapping game. Hand signs sometimes accompany the song, such as pulling on the bell in the first verse or making a phone gesture in the second.

This song is sometimes combined or confused with "Miss Lucy had a baby", which is sung to the same tune and also served as a jump-rope song. That song developed from verses of much older (and cruder) songs which were most commonly known as "Bang Bang Rosie" in Britain, "Bang Away Lulu" in Appalachia, and "My Lula Gal" in the West. The variants including a woman with an alligator purse urging the baby's mother to vote have been seen as a reference to Susan B. Anthony, an American suffragette and wife, and may be responsible for the steamboat owner's most common name today.

Structure

The rhyme is arranged in quatrains, with an A-B-C-B rhyme scheme. The rhyme is organized by its meter, a sprung rhythm in trimeter. Accentual verse (including sprung rhythm) is a common form in English folk verse, including nursery rhymes and jump-rope rhymes. The rhyme approaches taboo words, only to cut them off and modify them with an enjambment. It shares much of the same melody as the 1937 "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" used by Warner Bros. as the theme to their Looney Tunes cartoons.

Lyrics

Numerous versions exist, varying across time and regionally. One version is as follows:

Another version, from the early 1900s, begins as follows: