Popeye the Sailor Man

DESCRIPTION: "I'm Popeye the sailor man, full stop, I live in a caravan, ..." He opens a door and falls through the floor, or when he goes swimmin' he kisses the women, or slept with Queen Mary, or with his granny and tickled 'er fanny, or came from the Isle of Man...
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1973 (Opie/Opie-TheSingingGame)
KEYWORDS: playparty sailor courting | Popeye sailor
FOUND IN: Britain(England(Lond,North)) US(So)
REFERENCES (4 citations):
Opie/Opie-TheSingingGame 146, "Popeye the Sailor Man" (4 texts, 1 tune)
Solomon-ZickaryZan, p. 116, "Popeye"; p. 117, "Bowlegged Women" (2 texts)
Peirce-KeepTheKettleBoiling, p. 59, "(I'm Popeye the Sailor Man)" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Onwuchekwa Jemie, editor, Yo' Mama: New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes, and Children's Rhymes from Urban Black America (Philadelphia, 2003 (copyrighted material limited preview "Digitized by Google")) p. 107, "Popeye the Sailor Man" (1 text)
Roud #13511
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Popeye Went Down in the Cellar" (subject of Popeye)
NOTES [185 words]: Opie/Opie-TheSingingGame: "Recordings in the 1980s show that the punctuation endings are going out of favor, and the song is now often ornamented only by the ending 'Too too' or 'Poo poo!', an echo of the tugboat whistle in the original cartoon song written by Sammy Lerner in 1932."
Lerner's lyrics began "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man, I'm Popeye the Sailor Man, I'm strong to the finisch 'Cause I eats me spinach I'm Popeye the Sailor Man." The "toot, toot" was a sound effect (source: "Popeye the Sailor Man" on the National Institute of Health, Department of Health & Human Services (NIEHS) Kids' Pages site).
I'm sure Popeye lived in "a garbage can" and had no punctuation in Brooklyn in the 1940s, just as in Jemie. - BS
And Solomon-ZickaryZan has "Popeye the Jailor Man" live in "a garbage can," with variations; it also has him live in a "spinach can."
I suspect that several of these parodies actually arose separately; it's just too easy to parody this item. But since there is no way to trace origins of most of them, this item gets all the parodies that use the actual "Popeye the Sailor Man" tune. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: OpGa146

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