shewhomust | Hitting Geordie Johnson's pig with a shovel

Brian Matthew's Sounds of the Sixties radio show mostly plays familiar pop, but there's usually something to enjoy, and every now and then a real surprise.

Yesterday's show featured a track from a new CD of recordings by various artists of the songs of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart: I'd have said I'd never heard of them, but looking at the record details, there are some familiar songs there (mostly by the Monkees). All credit to Brian Matthew, he didn't play one of those, he played Lazy Elsie Molly, by Chubby Checker, which he explained was based on a children's nursery rhyme. The title reminded me, and

durham_rambler, of another song: Elsie Molly is lazy, is she? Like Elsie Marley, who's "grown so fine / She won't get up to feed the swine..."?

Well, no: although Elsie Molly in the song won't work in the mine now she's taken up with gentleman Jack, it's clearly a completely different song. Except that it isn't: as this page makes clear, the Mother Goose rhyme underlying Lazy Elsie Molly is indeed Elsie Marley (and you can hear Chubby Checker's version via that link, earworms at your own risk).

An' div ye ken Elsie Marley, hinny? I thought I did. And what I thought I knew (and more besides) is the story given here, that it's a north-east song about a woman who kept a pub, a song so popular that it is name-checked in another great song Byker Hill (and I can't shift the conviction that Elsie Marley is one of the very few songs I learned from my father). How did she stray into the clutches of Mother Goose?

I don't know, but there she is, in Gutenberg's copy, complete with Kate Greenaway illustration (scroll down or search).

Truly, on the internet, there are no degrees of separation.