We Sang About Bad Backs Before We Had Them
Art as Medicine · Ring around the rosy, tight bras and falling down: what children rehearse when they play
Every Halloween, children put on the faces of things that frighten them. Witches, ghosts, the monster under the bed. For one night they walk the streets as their fears and come home with candy. Adults call it dress-up. I think it’s rehearsal.
Children have always rehearsed. Most of the time they do it in songs.
Ring around the rosy
You probably know the version everyone tells. Ring around the rosy is the red rash of the plague. A pocket full of posies is the flowers people carried against the smell of death. Ashes, ashes is the bodies burning. We all fall down is exactly what it sounds like.
It’s a great story. It’s also almost certainly not true. Folklorists who have traced the rhyme find it in print in the late 1800s, centuries after the great plagues, and the plague explanation doesn’t show up until the 1900s. Earlier versions often didn’t have the ashes at all. The children were just spinning in a circle and dropping to the grass because falling down is fun.
So the darkest part of “Ring Around the Rosy” may be the story adults wrote for it later. We looked at children laughing and falling and decided they must be singing about death.
That tells you something about us. It also tells you something about children, because the truth is that the playground really is full of songs about things kids don’t have yet.
My back hurt, my bra too tight
Anyone who grew up in a clapping circle knows a version of this one:
My back hurt, my bra too tight, my booty shake from left to right.
Think about who’s singing it. Eight-year-olds. Girls with no back pain, no bra, and no idea yet what a long shift on your feet feels like. They clap it out at recess with total confidence, hips swinging, faces serious, as if they’ve been carrying the weight for years.
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They’re borrowing a body they don’t have yet. They’ve watched the women around them come home and rub their lower backs. They’ve heard the sigh, seen the hand go to the bra strap at the end of a long day. Long before they understand it, they turn it into rhythm.
That’s what a lot of playground songs are. Little rehearsals of grown-up life, sung by people too young to carry it. Songs about getting married, having babies, going to jail, getting sick, dying, being a lady, being a mama. Some are sweet. Some are a little shocking when you hear them as an adult. Almost all of them are about a future the singers are trying on to see how it fits.
The good and the bad, set to a beat
What strikes me now is how evenly those songs carry the good and the bad. The same circle that sings about first kisses sings about falling down. The same clap that counts out a wedding counts out a funeral. Children don’t separate the two the way we do. To them it’s all just what’s coming, and the way to meet what’s coming is to make it bounce.
That’s medicine, even if nobody calls it that. Rhythm makes a hard thing holdable. Repetition makes a scary thing familiar. A crowd of voices makes a lonely thing shared. A child who has sung “we all fall down” a hundred times, and gotten up laughing every time, has learned something about falling that no lecture could teach.
I make music now, and I keep finding my way back to those circle songs. Lately I’ve been reworking “Ring Around the Rosy” myself, slowing it down and listening to what’s underneath it. What I hear isn’t the plague. It’s the sound of a group of people deciding to fall together on purpose so that falling stops being frightening.
What we’re still rehearsing
Halloween is the one night adults admit the children were right. We put on the costume. We walk into the dark on purpose. We let the thing we’re afraid of have a face, and then we laugh at it, take its candy and go home.
The playground knew this all along. You don’t get ready for life by avoiding the scary parts. You get ready by singing them, with your friends, with your hips swinging, before you’re old enough to know what they mean.
So if you catch yourself humming one of those old rhymes this week, listen to it again. Ask what the child singing it was getting ready for. Then ask what you might still be getting ready for, and what song might help you carry it.
Ring around the rosy. We all fall down.
And then, every time, we all get back up.
Related from The Dignity Journal: The First Canvas Is the Room You Wake Up In
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