Today’s revisiting of Calvin and Hobbes:
The song sparrow segues into a bit of kidlore (beloved by campers and scout troops), and that gets Calvin thrown out of the house by his mother.
A lot of kidlore has no traceable history, but this one has an official story.
The Wikipedia account:
“On Top of Spaghetti” is a ballad and children’s song written and originally performed by folk singer Tom Glazer with the Do-Re-Mi Children’s Chorus in 1963. The song is sung to the tune of “On Top of Old Smoky”. It is essentially the tale of a meatball that was lost when “somebody sneezed”. The song discusses what happened to the meatball after it fell off of a pile of spaghetti and rolled away.
An early version of the song, attributed to middle school students in Lodi, California, was printed in the Lodi News-Sentinel on January 25, 1961.
The Glazer version is available on YouTube. I find it annoyingly cutesy and much prefer a 1999 version by the Persuasions, on their kids’ album Good Ship Lollipop (a version that is unfortunately not available on-line, so far as I can tell).
I was a bit surprised to discover that the song is only about 50 years old, but then estimates of time depths are unreliable in many domains.
