Annotation:Monkey's Wedding

Back to Monkey's Wedding

---

MONKEY'S WEDDING. AKA - "The Monkey Married the Baboon's Sister," "Paw Paw Patch," "Ten Little Indians." American, Canadian; Air (4/4 time). A 'monkey's wedding' is a term for a sunshower (i.e. when it lightly rains but the sun shines through) in South Africa, but in other parts of the English-speaking world as well. In fact, there are a variety of similar terms, often involving inter-species marrying (or sometimes referencing the Devil) for the phenomenon.

However, "The Monkey's Wedding" is also a song, originally a comic song, but most often heard nowadays (when it is heard) as a children's song. Variants, sometimes quite distanced, are wide-spread throughout the English-speaking world (see Mudcat discussion [1]). The following opening stanza is from Carl Sandburg's American Songbag (1927):

The monkey married the baboon's sister,
Gave her a ring and then he kissed her.
She set up a yell.
The bridesmaid stuck on some court-plaster.
It stuck so fast it couldn't stick faster.
Surely 'twas a sad disaster,
But it soon got well.

The song is older that Sandburg's volume, however, and was published in W. E Tunis' The Shilling Song Book (Niagara Falls, N.Y., p. 16) nearly word-for-word.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources:

Recorded sources: RCA Victor LCP 1001, Ned Landry and his New Brunswick Lumberjacks - "Bowing the Strings with Ned Landry."

See also listing at:
Jane Keefer's Folk Music Index: An Index to Recorded Sources [2]

---