Cherries are Ripe

DESCRIPTION: "Cherries are Ripe, cherries are ripe, (The robin sang one day)." Various endings: cherries are given to the baby, or the students greet their teacher. The origin might be a cherry-sellers cry: "Cherry ripe, cherry ripe, Some are black and some are white"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1960 (Tobitt)
KEYWORDS: bird nonballad food
FOUND IN: US(NE)
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Pankake/Pankake-PrairieHomeCompanionFolkSongBook, p. 99, "Cherries are Ripe" (1 text, possibly a parody of more normal texts, but the other versions I've seen of this are so short that it could also be a "straight" fragment that didn't survive elsewhere)
Tobitt-TheDittyBag, p. 26, "Cherries Are Ripe" (1 short text, 1 tune; I suspect this is ancestral to the Pankake version)
ADDITIONAL: Roy Palmer, _The Folklore of Warwickshire_, Rowman and Littlefield, 1976, p. 121, (no title), a cherry-seller's rhyme from Warwickshire in the 1920s, which might be related to the original source of the piece
RECORDINGS:
Margaret MacArthur, "Cherries Are Ripe" (on MMacArthur01)
File: PHCFS099

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