What's New

23 Oct 2024. Found an expanded version of Mess Songs & Rhymes of the RAAF (1945). This copy has 99 pages and is lacking page 9. Other known copies have 76 pages. This expanded edition is probably by the same compiler as the type-face for the two editions match.

6 Oct 2024. Added three US Air Force squadron songbooks: The 431st Sings (1950s), The Official Thirsty 71st Song Book, and 522nd Fireballs Songbook.

29 Aug 2024. The combined PDF of hensteeth.com.

2 May 2024. Added PDFs of the Hensteeth.com labels, performers, and titles. The PDF of the labels is extensively updated by this editor with added photos of labels with the addition of some new party record labels.

31 Mar 2024. Added an archive of hensteeth.com (dated 2003) and a later, broken, archive of hensteeth.com (after 2010). Save a local copy of both archives by downloading this zip file.

28 Oct 2023.

From Music to My Sorrow by G. Legman, pg 389:

For Men must fight, and women must weep.
And the sooner it's over the sooner to sleep.

28 Oct 2023.

From Music to My Sorrow by G. Legman, pg 15:

Fuck 'em all! Fuck 'em all! Fuck 'em ALL!
The long and the short and the tall;
When you're a civilian, it one in a million,
But when you're in camp, fuck 'em all!

6 March 2023.

From World I Never Made by G. Leman, pg 34:

At the bar, at the bar
Where I smoked my first cigar
And my pecker just by chance,
I slipped it up her pants

26 Jan 2023.

1) From Mooncalf by G. Legman, pg 76, the phrase "Whistle or Sing, or Show Us Your Thing" as a request from hobos to be entertained while riding an empty train box car.

2) Found the band that made the anonymous Naughty Butt Nice LP. It was done by The Swingin' Pennsylvania Dutch Band (featuring Heffenstreger's Dutch Band).

22 Jan 2023.

From Mooncalf by G. Legman, pg 62., the phrase "I'd eat a yard of her shit for a lick at her hole".

19 Jan 2023.

From I Love You I Really Do, Part 2, page 444-445, a bawdy version of "St. James Infirmary Blues" sung by an African-American woman, presumed by G. Legman to be a lesbian, ca 1934:

I went down to St. James Infirmary,
Saw my baby laying there;
She was stretched out on a table,
With her tits and cunt all bare

Let her go, let her go, god damn her!
Wherever she may be;
She can look this whole world over
But she'll never find a [spoken: hot-fucking, tit-sucking] man like me.

14 Jan 2023.

Ran across a bawdy toast I hadn't seen before:

Here's to the storks that bring pretty babies,
Here's to the crows that bring ugly babies,
and Here's to the swallows that bring no babies.

13 Jan 2023

We are reading I Love You I Really Do, Part 2. Sung to a girl who asked for a "nice" bawdy song. Sung with a "proper mock-Irish brogue and lilting tune":

When you take it in your hand, Mistress Murphy,
You'll find it only weighs three-quarters of a pound.
It's got feathers on the neck like a turkey,
Will you take it standing up or laying down?

28 Dec 2022

We are reading, G. Leman's seven volume autobiography. Here are a few items of folklore from I Love You I Really Do, Part I. Is one item I hadn't seen before:

There's a nigger in the grass
And he's up the Kaiser's ass --
Pull him out, Uncle Sam,
Pull him out, pull him out!

To the bugle-call tune "Assembly". Learned at Boy Scout summer camp ca 1928.

26 May 2020.

1) Link to the Ed Cray Collection.

2) Link to the James "Jim" McWilliam Collection.

3) Link to the Janice Lackey children's rhymes.

4) Link to the Sam Hilt Collection

14 May 2020. Added the 1983 XL Rugby Football Club songbook.

13 May 2020. Minor revisions to the The Merry Muses Bibliography.

5 May 2020. Added very strange 90 page Merry Muses. We revised The Merry Muses Bibliography (and the PDF) to reflect this discovery.

3 May 2020. Revised The Merry Muses Bibliography:

1) Thanks to Neil Crawford we now have a scan of the title page to Legman's type-facsimile of The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1965).

2) We found two variants of the paperback "1885" (really c1969) Merry Muses.

3) Found a version of The Merry Muses (90 pages) at the G. Ross Roy Collection that matches the online catalog entry from a book dealer. Revised the bookseller entry in the bibliography to suggest that they are the same variant.

4) Added three Merry Muses sound recordings: Two LPs and one CD.

1 May 2020. Revised the rugby songbooks & recordings page.

30 Apr 2020. Added PDF version of the 1799 The Merry Muses of Caledonia.

24 Apr 2020. Substantive additions to The Merry Muses Bibliography:

1) Found the auction record of the William Hamilton Bruce manuscript copy of the William Scott Douglas' copy of the 1st edition.

2) Added reference to an 1843 edition at the Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg (BNUS) titled Burns's Merry Muses : a choice collection of Favourite Songs. This is a strange title and there is no other bibliographic information -- no publisher, location, number of pages -- is listed. The provenance is listed as "purchased in 1875".

3) Found an 1899 auction record for a privately printed Merry Muses that is dated 1888.

4) Revised, corrected & expanded the notes on the 1904 J.S. Farmer manuscript copy.

23 Apr 2020. Received a photo of the title pages of both a Merry Muses (the ca 1880 reprint of the 1843 edition) and Forbidden Fruit (ca 1895). Both of these photos have been added to The Merry Muses Bibliography.

22 Apr 2020. Issued a revised PDF of The Merry Muses Bibliography.

20 Apr 2020. Revised the Merry Muses bibliography. We added a reference to a ca 1804 Merry Muses and found a variant of Roy, Merry Muses, 4, State 2.

19 Apr 2020. Added the ca 1955 Fighting One Twenty-Two Song Book [US Navy VF-122 Black Angels Fighter Squadron Songbook].

18 Apr 2020. Merry Muses of Caledonia bibliography updated. Created a PDF of the bibliography.

15 Apr 2020. Added a photo and more details for The Giblet Pye in the Merry Muses of Caledonia bibliography.

12 Apr 2020. Extensive revision of the Merry Muses of Caledonia bibliography. After working a few days on this, it is much more presentable.

7 Apr 2020. Added the 314th Air Division Song Book. This 1950s songbook copies the less risqué songs and illustrations from The Three Hats Vol 1 & Vol 2.

1 Apr 2020. Added two songs sung by Clint Eastwood in the movie The Mule (2018): My Name is Poncho Villa, I've Got the Gonorrhea and You So Ugly, You So Ugly, You So Ugly Childe.

31 Mar 2020. Revised the Hash House Harrier songbooks page.

30 Mar 2020.

1) Added The First Boke of Fowle Ayres (1944). This Australian military songbook is one of the first mimeographed songbooks and is referenced by other Australian songbooks.

2) Added links to four more items on the military songbooks page. There are now 279 items.

29 Mar 2020. Revised the Military Songbooks page. There are now links to 275 documents -- mostly privately printed songbooks -- related to military songs.

26 Mar 2020. Added a 1920s edition of The Merry Muses published by the Caledonian Society. We believe this is a first printing of this edition. We have two later copies (see here and here) that have a redesigned title page, are "privately printed", and a limitation of "500 copies".

25 Mar 2020. Added a three items:

1) Added Obiter Dictum (1979) manuscript by Donald C. Laycock.

2) Legman's copy of The One, the Only Baker House Super-Duper Extra Crude Song Book (1963) from MIT. This copy is incomplete but has three pages of songs that are missing the the Ed Cray copy. If one combined both copies, it would still do not make a complete songbook.

3) Added a miscellaneous collection of songs & rhymes most of which appear to be part of a longer work. The collected songs & rhymes date from the 1950s-1970s in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

24 Mar 2020. Added several items:

1) Supplement to Randolph MS (1979) by R. C Bentley.

2) Notes on Cray's Erotic Muse (1976) by Jonathan Lighter.

3) An incomplete copy of Songs of Roving & Raking with additional notes & poems by John Walsh. This supplements the complete version.

4) Added another copy of Lusty Limericks & Bawdy Ballads by Dick Harde. This copy also appears to derive from the Kinsey Institute library.

5) Added a type-script copy of various items from the McAtee booklets. The folder was titled W.L. McAtee & His Printed Booklets.

6) Added a partial copy of Down-East Ballads and Songs (1952) by H P Beck, Jr.

23 Mar 2020. Added a rare version of The Merry Muses titled: A Collection of Unpublished Poems of Robert Burns.

-- Archive of Changes --