Is there something about Lutherans and death?

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
11/09/2019 at 00:55 • Filed to: None

I was just thinking about some old songs my dad learned during camp as a child that we used to sing on long drives back in the ‘70s when my sister and I were children. There seems to be a recurring theme that makes me wonder why you’d teach these to kids. The ‘50s must have been a really different time. Maybe there are some more modern children’s songs that are equally morbid, but not having kids I wouldn’t know...

Sweet Rosie O’ Grady
She was a seamstress by birth
She got tired of living
And decided to leave this earth

So she ate a tape measure
But dying by inches was hard
So she went out in the garden
And lay down and died by the yard

Away out in the forest
There lived a mean old man
His name was Mr. Johnny Rebeck
And he could surely plan
All the neighbors’ cats and dogs
Were always at his feet
So he invented a machine
That turned them all to meat

Hey Mr. Johnny Rebeck,
How could you be so mean
We told you you’d be sorry
For inventing that machine
All the neighbors’ cats and dogs
Will never more be seen
They’ve all been ground to sausages
In Johnny Rebeck’s machine

One day a boy came walking,
He walked into the store
He bought a pack of sausages
And placed them on the floor
Then he began to whistle,
He whistled up a tune
And all the little sausages,
They danced around the room

Hey Mr. Johnny Rebeck,
How could you be so mean
We told you you’d be sorry
For inventing that machine
All the neighbors’ cats and dogs
Will never more be seen
They’ve all been ground to sausages
In Johnny Rebeck’s machine

One day the darn thing busted,
The darn thing wouldn’t go
So Johnny Rebeck climbed inside
To see what made it so
His wife she had a nightmare
While walking in her sleep
She gave the crank a great big yank
And Johnny Rebeck was meat

Hey Mr. Johnny Rebeck,
How could you be so mean
We told you you’d be sorry
For inventing that machine
All the neighbors’ cats and dogs
Will never more be seen
They’ve all been ground to sausages
In Johnny Rebeck’s machine

DISCUSSION (9)

This is what we'll show whenever you publish anything on Kinja: > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
11/09/2019 at 01:17

Nursery rhymes and kids songs used to be morbid af if you actually gave them any thought. .

Ring around the rose y, pockets full of poseys, ashes ashes we all fall down. (Re: The black plague)

Al l around the mullbury bush the monkey chased the weasel. The monkey thought it was all in fun. Pop goes the weasel. (Um, wat? Ow!)

Rock a bye baby, we stru ng your ass up from a tree and a storm came and sorry eh.

I could probably go on...

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
11/09/2019 at 01:31

A whole lot of classic children’s literature, songs, rhymes and the like are extraordinarily dark and morbid. They came from a time when child morbidity was a common thing. People got sick and died, all the time. The experience that children usually don’t die is a pretty recent thing in the human history.

I was actually looking at the records of a local funeral home in Las Cruces from the late 1940's today at work in the archives. Over half of the funeral records are for children under 2 years old, and that was in the United States just after WWII. Childhood morbidity was a very common thing until not that long ago in the human experience.

Among the other half or so of the records are the smattering of old age, accidents and suicides you would expect, but even so I couldn’t help but notice how many records there were for folks in their teens, 20's and 30's who got TB, pneumonia, the flu or otherwise got sick and died at the local hospital or clinics.