Children’s Playground Games And Songs In The New Media Age (Excerpt Of A British Project Report 2009-2011)

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents an excerpt of a 2009-2011 project report on British children's play. with a focus on "clapping games".

The content of this post is presented for folkloric and historical purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all the people who participated in this research and this writing, including all of the children who were interviewed and/or observed.

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JOURNAL EXCERPT
From https://www.playscotland.org/wp-content/uploads/playgroundgamesprojectreport3.pdf 
Children’s playground games and songs in the new media age

"[page] 3

SECTION 1: INTRODUCTION

This project, a collaboration between the Universities of London, Sheffield and East London with the British Library, aimed to develop our understanding of children’s playground games and songs, building on the Opie collection at the British Library. It has added new material, developed a new archive, website, film and computer game prototype, and investigated the connections between the vernacular lore of the playground and children’s media cultures in the digital age. 

The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, under the Beyond Text programme (www. beyondtext.ac.uk), and has the support of Iona Opie and of Michael Rosen, the former Children’s Laureate.

[…]

SECTION 3: WHAT WE HAVE FOUND - KEY THEMES

[...]

3.2 Continuity, Change, and Transmission

Just as the Opies found many continuities between their collections and examples from earlier periods, we in turn have found that the principal genres of play encountered in our two schools are striking for their similarity to those the Opies documented. Thus, We have found singing games, clapping games, counting-out games, chasing games, skipping games, games with playthings , and so on. At the same time, it is clear that some games have declined – we found no evidence of marbles, conkers or French skipping, for example, and limited evidence of hopscotch.

Although we should be wary of generalisations based on just two schools in comparison with the national scope of the Opies’ survey, we have been fortunate to be able to triangulate our findings with those of a number of colleagues, especially Steve Roud in his recent book, The Lore of the Playground. With regard to clapping games, for example, we have found that much of the classic repertoire of the 1960s and ‘70s persists, –such as ‘I went to a Chinese Restaurant’, Under the Bram Bush, I Gave My Love an Apple, and ‘A Sailor Went to Sea’, although with interesting variations, such as the replacing of the first line of ‘I Went to a Chinese Restaurant’ with the more prosaic ‘My Mummy Sent Me Shopping’ at the Sheffield school. This example illustrates another trend, also found by Roud, towards the lengthening of clapping games by the combining of what were previously two ‘standalone’ songs, in this case ‘Chinese Restaurant’ with the movement routine designated ‘Diana Dors’ by the Opies. Nowadays the movie star in the latter is likely to be a contemporary pop singer, such as Katy Perry or Britney Spears, but, in one micro-variation, a group of girls consistently substituted the fictional, and defiant rather than glamorous, character of Tracy Beaker in this slot. The evidence from our two schools is that a number of new clapping games have entered the repertoire since the publication of the Opies’ book, The Singing Game in 1985. One of these is Eeny-Meeny-Dessameeney, recorded on the Sheffield playground,.Nonetheless, analogues of this game were subsequently located both in the Opies’ sound collection at the British Library and in their manuscript collection at the Bodleian. Another clapping game, ‘Lemonade’, recorded at the London school, is likewise absent from all the major published collections from the UK, but an analogue was found as a ball bouncing rhyme among

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the unpublished materials of Father Damian Webb at the Pitt Rivers Museum. There is clearly much significant comparative evidence in these, and no doubt other, archives. As other researchers have noted before us, the processes of transmission at work here involve the passing-on of games from older to younger children, between siblings and cousins, and in some cases from teachers and playworkers to children. These processes have sometimes been seen as an example of oral formulaic transmission, in which texts are not simply learnt and performed as whole entities, but as formulaic systems subject to extensive recombination, reworking, improvisation, and composition-in-performance (Marsh, 2008). 

However, oral-formulaic theory has largely been applied to the transmission of linguistic texts. As some scholars have emphasised, the transmission of traditions of all kinds, including verbal forms, relies on customary example as well as oral transmission, for example in the transmission of performance style.

One of the efforts of our project has been to recognise that the performative practices of the playground are made up as much of music, physical movement, gestural repertoires, and the imaginative use of found physical objects and environments as they are of language. Orality is multimodal (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2000). A methodological challenge for our project, then, is to analyse the games we find across all the modes of signification they employ. How are gestures, dance routines, structures of embodied play developed, transmitted, learnt and adapted? Again, the example of clapping games is apropos here as there seems to have been a general increase in the repertoire of clapping patterns and associated gestures and moves since the 1960s and ‘70s, probably due to the influence of hip hop and other forms of Black American popular music. The questions of continuity, change and transmission must also be extended beyond the local networks of families and schools to the global networks of the digital era. Indeed, a sense of global transmission is already present in the Opies’ work, as they note the migration of a clapping game from England to an International school in Jerusalem; or the near-simultaneous appearance of a parody of the theme tune of the Davy Crockett radio series in the 1950s in both Wales and Australia. In the age of new media, further processes of global transmission appear.

Children are learning songs and games from television shows, DVDs, and Youtube; while adult recreations of the games they remember from childhood are also to be found on Youtube. We have been able to study specific instances of children’s engagements with these media as a source for their play and observe the differing ways in which children draw on their affordances. Finally, we have observed analogies between the accounts of transmission deployed in folklore studies, typically applied to the folkloric forms emphasised in the Opies’ work, and the accounts of the appropriation and transformation of media texts given in media studies. The latter describes the mash-up culture typical of the participatory internet, such as Youtube parodies, pastiches, remixes and spoofs (see Willett, 2009), or fan art, fiction and tribute sites (eg Jenkins, 2006; Ito et al, 2008). Both fields of study, though there are significant differences, emphasise the agency of ordinary people, processes of informal cultural production, the improvisatory and performative nature of these processes, and the hybridity of the outcomes. Rather than draw hard and fast lines between folkloric oral transmission and media- based mash-up cultures, then, it seems more productive to view these as overlapping domains of cultural practice. 

3.3 The importance of media-based play

The Opies themselves were clear about the importance of media cultures as a resource for children’s play, and documented the incorporation of advertising jingles, TV theme tunes, popular songs and other phenomena in clapping and skipping games, playground performances, and pretend play. Our investigation of the Opie sound archive has produced even greater evidence of the integration of media cultures with children’s play than is represented in their publications. Examples include children performing songs by Gary Glitter, Lena Zavaroni and Abba, and referencing gameshows such as Larry Grayson’s ‘Shut That Door!’ What is interesting about the extent of such material is not simply that Iona Opie found it, but that she took such care to record it, suggesting the importance she attributed to it as a legitimate aspect of playground culture, even if such material did not always survive into the publications.

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In many ways, our project has demonstrated a continuation of this integration of play and media cultures. The question is, the, what might have changed? We are still seeing children performing songs by Abba, dance routines from musicals, and other adaptations of ‘old’ media. However, it is also clear that newer genres such as reality TV make their appearance in the playground...

[…]

 In the playground, children are still singing rhymes and songs that have come down through the decades, whilst sometimes bringing them up to date with references to the latest TV shows, soap opera characters and pop stars. Skipping games and clapping games are still popular, and hula-hoops have made a come-back.

Cheerleading and other dance routines are in evidence, children citing influences as diverse as Michael Jackson and High School Musical. Make-believe games and old favorites such as Tig are staples of the primary school playground. Media is an undeniably important aspect of children’s lives, but part of a wider repertoire of playground culture that also includes older games, songs and rhymes.

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3.6 The multicultural Playground

Globalisation and widespread migration mean that, for children in many schools, diversity is a feature of their social and auditory environment. This environmental diversity is used to creative advantage. Material for play is acquired from a variety of sources, then combined and manipulated using a wide range of strategies. Within the playground children may play games learnt at home or on visits to their own or parents’ countries of origin and share games with friends, who thus acquire new games from cultures other than their own. These songs and games may be played within the confines of a small friendship group or may permeate the playground.

Like any games they will be varied over time in the playground and may be combined with other games to form new repertoire.

Inter-ethnic transmission of games and game components seems to be facilitated by a number of factors.

 The first of these are the multi-ethnic constitution of friendship groups and the psychological safety provided by the friendship group. Where groups of friends have varying ethnicities, they may feel comfortable about sharing games within that friendship group, where there is acceptance and empathy.

 Another contributing factor is a high level of ethnic diversity, so that ‘difference’ becomes a norm. In schools with multi-ethnic populations, the dominant culture is less dominant and diverse social practices, including playground games, are more easily shared and accepted. The presence of dominant minority groups will also often result in ethnically-based play occurring in the playground. Where there is a small group of one ethnicity within a school with a dominant majority, inter-ethnic sharing of games is less likely to occur.

 The confidence and popularity of individual children will sometimes generate interest in games, which they play and confidently share with others of differing ethnicity.

 Children are also constantly interested in novelty. New games in different languages or with novel movements may generate interest on the part of other children. Where children recognise known game components in new manifestations, they may also immediately wish to join in the game, learning the new elements as the game proceeds.

 The lack of importance of semantic content (or meaning) of game texts also contributes to the ease of participation in games in the dominant language by children from other language backgrounds and to the adoption of game components from traditions utilising other languages into the canon of games in the playground for varying periods of time.

However, the extent to which this occurs varies between different contexts, often depending on an established school climate of acceptance to flourish. Limited exposure to ethnic difference naturally also limits inter-ethnic exchange.

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SECTION 4: CATEGORIES OF PLAY

The following text is the script of the nine categories of play produced by the project for the organisation of the website, spoken by Michael Rosen. We include it here because it provides a rationale for these categories, as well as an indication of how the historical aspects of our project integrate with the contemporary view of today’s playgrounds.

4.1 CLAPPING GAMES

Clapping games are the big recent success story of the playground, and have exploded in popularity since the 1960s. These games involve a combination of clapping hands with a partner while singing or chanting a rhyme. The 3-beat clap is the basis of many clapping games, and consists of clapping your partner’s hands in an up-down movement, then clapping your partner’s hands straight on, then clapping your own hands). But this basic clap is often extended into much more complex patterns. And it’s often interspersed with movements and gestures associated with the words, like Eeny meeny dessameeny.

Part of the appeal of clapping games is often the challenge of chanting or singing while performing these difficult rhythms, and synchronising movements with other people, especially at the extraordinary speeds many children achieve.

Some clapping routines are seen as easier and others harder – A Sailor Went to Sea, sea, sea is often seen as a beginner’s rhyme (though even here there are variations in how hard the accompanying clapping pattern can be. For instance whether the clapping echoes the triple repetition of the line endings: sea sea sea; chop chop chop; knee knee knee. Other games like ‘Hi Lo Jackalo’ or ‘Double Double This This’ may be seen as harder. 

Clapping routines can be learnt from family, friends, out-of-school activities, on the media, and even on the Internet. YouTube, for instance, features a variety of children enacting favourite routines, but also adults nostalgically recalling and re-enacting their memories of clapping as a child.

The earliest clapping game in Europe – still well-known today - was probably the adult-and-child game, Pat-a-cake, which was first documented, according to the Opies, in 1698. Child-with-child clapping games aren’t documented till the 1820s, when they were noted in France - references to them in Britain don’t crop up till the late 19th century. Even then, evidence of clapping is patchy up to WW1 and almost non-existent from then until the 1960s when clapping games really took off among children, mainly girls.

While the pat-a-cake style clapping is still popular, there is a growing repertoire of clapping moves and more complicated routines of body percussion, some involving 12 or more beats before repeating.

Many of the most popular ones are sung to the same tune – the one used for A Sailor Went to Sea, sea, sea and I Went to a Chinese Restaurant. Some come from counting out rhymes, like Eeny meeny dessameeny, or previously did duty for ball bouncing or skipping, like My boyfriend gave me an apple. Some come from pop songs, such as That’s the Way I Like It by KC and the Sunshine Band, 1975. Others were already circulating as rhymes and were picked up in pop songs which in turn made them even more popular, like The Clapping Song, recorded by Shirley Ellis in1965, and began: ‘3, 6, 9, the goose drank wine, the monkey chew tobacco on the streetcar line’. Like this song, many found in the UK have come over from America, especially from black American traditions and popular musics. The content of the words is often humorous and off-the-wall.

Nonsense words which are just fun to say are common, and there are sometimes mild sexual innuendos, like ‘When Susie Was a Teenager a teenager she was, and she went ooh, ah, I’ve lost my bra, left my knickers in my boyfriends car’; and ‘My Name Is Britney Spears, I’m a movie star, I’ve got the curly wurly knickers and the see-through bra’. 

These games are a link with the past – with the cultures of their parents and grandparents – though this is unlikely to be of particular interest to the children who play them, who often claim they’ve just made them up. They appeal in more immediate ways. They’re a way of learning and demonstrating physical skills, and a way of playing with language, often humorously. They’re a way of exploring daring themes, and the exciting prospect of teenage life just round the corner.

And they’re a way of announcing friendship: who gets included as well as who’s excluded.

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-snip-
This is the end of this excerpt of that report.

Here's a list of the other categories of British children's play that are discussed in that pdf:

4.2 SKIPPING GAMES

4.3 SINGING GAMES

4.4 RUNNING AROUND GAMES

4.5 PLAYING WITH THINGS

4.6 PRETEND PLAY

4.7 COUNTING-OUT

4.8 JOKES AND RUDE RHYMES

4.9 BALL GAMES
-snip-
In the United States, the "skipping games" category is known as "jump rope rhymes".

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