>> " The song Pop goes the Weasel derives from the counter at the back of
the yarn reel or clock reel or wool reel depending on where you are from.
<<
This song doesn't have anything to do with a yarn reel, darn it. It's been
pretty well established that the 'pop' refers to putting something in the
pawn shop. Here's an excerpt from an article that can be found at the very
long URL I've put at the bottom of this message.
wrnk
d2
POP GOES THE WEASEL
Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
That's the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.
Up and down the City road,
In and out the Eagle,
That's the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.
Every night when I go out
the monkey's on the table.
Take a stick and knock it off
Pop goes the weasel.
A penny for a ball of thread
Another for a needle,
That's the way the money goes,
pop goes the weasel.
All around the cobblers bench
the monkey chased the people;
The donkey thought 'twas all in fun,
pop goes the weasel.
Before anybody rushes to put fingers to keyboard, let me say that this is
by no means the only version of the lyric. There are several others,
especially from the United States. But this is the usual British version, a
famous catchy rhyme (or at least, as you say, the first two verses are).
The earliest reference I can find to music with this name actually comes
from the United States, from sheet music entitled "Pop goes the Weasel for
Fun and Frolic", published in 1850 by Messrs Miller and Beacham of
Baltimore. Another from three years later refers to "the latest
English
dance" and also "an old English Dance lately revived", so it seems to have
been imported from Britain. None of these early versions had any lyrics
apart from a repeated "Pop goes the weasel", the catch line of the dance,
which was sung or shouted by the dancers as one pair of them darted under
the arms of the others. Several references in books and magazines suggest
that the tune soon became extremely well known, and that pop goes the
weasel became a catchphrase, as it later did in Britain. There have been
suggestions that the phrase was intended to be ribald or erotic, though the
explanations I've seen are somewhat fanciful.
Following first publication of this article, David Joyce wrote that: "The
tune is a version of that used for the country dance, The Haymakers, which
has the same form as Strip the Willow, and Bab at the Bowster (a couple
hold hands, forming a bridge, which the other couples have to pass under).
The tune was published in Gow's Repository, issued in four volumes between
1799 and 1820. Thus the tune was around at least half a century before the
American publication of Pop Goes The Weasel, but is certainly very much
older. (It is similar to the tune used for Humpty Dumpty, and not far
removed from Lilliebulero and Rock A-bye Baby, all jigs traceable back to
the seventeenth century.)
The first British mention of the phrase pop goes the weasel dates from an
advertisement by Boosey and Sons of 1854 which described "the new
country dance 'Pop goes the weasel', introduced by her Majesty Queen
Victoria" (a puff to be taken with a large pinch of salt, we may assume).
It would seem from the dates that the title was taken from the American
publication of 1850.
Some of the references are now quite opaque, but we can take a fair shot at
a few. In the second verse, the City Road was - still is - a well-known
street in London, more than a mile long. The Eagle was a famous public
house and music hall, which lay near the east end of the road on the corner
of Shepherdess Walk; this had started its life as a tea-garden, but was
turned into a music hall in 1825 (one of the very first); it ended its days
as a Salvation Army centre and was pulled down in 1901.
The City Road had a pawnbroker's shop near its west end and to pop was a
well-known phrase at the time for pawning something. So the second verse
says that visiting the Eagle causes one's money to vanish, necessitating a
trip up the City Road to Uncle to raise some cash.
But what was the weasel that was being pawned? Nobody is sure. Some suggest
it was a domestic or tailor's flat-iron, a small item easy to carry. My own
guess is that it's rhyming slang: weasel and stoat = coat. Either way, it
seems to have been a punning reinterpretation of the catch line from the
older dance.
The first verse just refers to a couple of domestic food items; the fourth
to sewing or tailors' requisites. The third introduces the monkey, one
sense of that word being a nineteenth-century term for a drinking vessel in
a public house, which makes sense in context. (It may derive from an older
phrase, to suck the monkey, to drink from a bottle, which was also used by
dock workers in London for illicitly drinking brandy from a cask by
inserting a straw through the bung.) A stick was a shot of spirits, such as
rum or brandy; to knock it off was to knock it back, or drink it. (There
have been many other slang meanings of monkey, some extremely rude, of
which the most famous is perhaps that for �500 or $500; from context, this
is unlikely to be the meaning meant!)
The reference to the monkey in the fifth verse stumps me; in this case it
seems to be a real beast. It could be one belonging to an organ-grinder, an
itinerant musician who played a small portable organ, of whom there were
many at this period. But I suspect there are topical or slang references in
there that are now lost.
World Wide Words is copyright � Michael Quinion, 1996-. All rights
reserved. Page created 10 June 2000; last updated 17 June 2000.
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