Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing, The

DESCRIPTION: A customer and a prostitute engage in oral sex, "each trying to get their guns off first into the other's heads," until he offers to give it "the boar-hog grind."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: before 1976 (recorded by Logsdon from Riley Neal)
KEYWORDS: bawdy whore sex
FOUND IN: US(So,SW)
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Randolph/Legman-RollMeInYourArms II, pp. 601-603, "The Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing" (3 texts)
Logsdon-WhorehouseBellsWereRinging 23, pp. 145-148, "The Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing" (1 text, 1 tune)
DT, WHBELLS*
Roud #10093
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Fatal Wedding" (tune)
SAME TUNE:
Carolina Twins, "The Boarding House Bells Are Ringing" (Victor 21575, 1928)
NOTES [120 words]: Either the Carolina Twins' recording is a cleaned-up version of "The Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing" or, more likely, the original of which this is a parody. There is also song called "The Convent Bells Are Ringing," of unknown relationship. - PJS
Logsdon-WhorehouseBellsWereRinging thinks "Whorehouse" is a direct parody of "The Fatal Wedding," with which it shares a tune, but I incline to think there was an intermediate version. "The Boarding House Bells Are Ringing" strikes me as a reasonable candidate.
Logsdon's informant Riley Neal confesses that this song is "just plumb nasty." I incline to agree; most bawdy songs theoretically have a humorous element, but this one strikes me as existing only to disgust. - RBW
File: RL601

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