Peri meri dixi dominee

[mmcirvin]

"The Riddle Song" (aka "I Gave My Love A Cherry") is a fairly well-known folk song with many variants that showed up a while back in Jorie's "Music Together" class. (I hadn't remembered that it's also the song the guy is singing in Animal House when Belushi's character smashes his guitar.) The song has many variants going back to the 1400s, as discussed in this Mudcat thread; while the cherry or analogous fruit with no stone and the chicken with no bone usually seem to show up first and second, the third and fourth riddles tend to vary a lot. There's a popular and logically neat theory that the riddles were all about sex originally, but there seems to be no actual evidence for this.

Anyway, the best-known version of the song, which is gentle and lullaby-like, didn't really grab me when I heard it on a Music Together CD, but we just encountered a recording of a jaunty and silly variant with a completely different tune, sung by, of all people, the Wiggles, that is amusing for the strange fake-Latin chant that forms the chorus: "Petrum, partrum, paradisi tempore, peri meri dixi dominie".

This version seems to have some history of its own, and it's mentioned in a few places in that Mudcat thread, but nobody online seems to have much of an idea about where this "peri meri dixi" business came from, other than that it's obviously a parody of church Latin. The Spinners recorded something lyrically very close to the Wiggles version. One thing that makes it hard to Google is that nonsense is kind of like noncoding DNA: there's less selection pressure to weed out weird mutations over the years. Aside from spelling variants, there are versions that go "peri meri dictum" and "hotum, potum, paradise tantum" and "partum quartum perry deek entum" (or "pare dicentem"--that recording seems to be a mashup of "Peri Meri Dixi" with the earliest known version of "The Riddle Song", "I Have a Yong Suster") and even "peri meri winkle domine".

The packages come across the sea from one person or, more often, from four people, brothers or sisters of the narrator. Occasionally there might be a vague implication that "Peri, Meri, Dixi and Dominie" are the names of the people sending the paradoxical packages, but usually not. The versions of this song on this branch usually lack the romantic angle, but that Mudcat thread mentions a Scottish version, described as very old by William Dauney in 1838, that actually does have the presents coming from a "true love" (and goes "rattum, pattum, para me dicksa do me nee").

The chant is similar to phrases like "hocus pocus" but I don't know enough about Latin services to know if it's a parody of anything in particular. The Dauney citation makes me think it's gone through centuries of munging that might well obscure any particular connection; it's from the 1700s at the very latest.

There does seem to be a print literature on it; I wonder if there's any illumination to be had there.

Comments

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

IHNJH, IJLS Macaronic Latin.

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

My favorite riddle song is the version of "Lay the Bent to the Bonnie Broom" recorded by Brian Peters on his CD "Sharper Than the Thorn". It takes a couple of unexpected turns, one where the questioner (a woman) tells the man he'll be hers unless he answers all her questions, and another when in the last verse the song suddenly falls into a very different category of traditional ballad...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

At some point near the bottom of that thread, somebody posts three versions of "Lay the Bent to the Bonnie Broom" with different numbers of twists in the story, the third of which is this one.

[acw.livejournal.com]

Noel Streatfeild was an English author, primarily known for her novels for children. The novels often dealt with the lives of children in the performing arts. Somewhere in her Gemma series, the eponymous heroine sings the song you discuss here; the Gemma books were published in the late 1960's.