Folk Rhyme
The case was memorialized in a popular skipping-rope rhyme:
-
- Lizzie Borden took an axe
- And gave her mother forty whacks.
- When she saw what she had done
- She gave her father forty-one.
Folklore says the rhyme was made up by an anonymous writer as a tune to sell newspapers. Others attribute it to the ubiquitous, but anonymous "Mother Goose". In reality, Lizzie's stepmother suffered 18 or 19 blows; her father, 11 blows.
Read more about this topic: Lizzie Borden
Famous quotes containing the words folk and/or rhyme:
“In the past, the English tried to impose a system wherever they went. They destroyed the nation’s culture and one of the by- products of their systemisation was that they destroyed their own folk culture.”
—Martin Carthy (b. 1941)
“Come, fix upon me that accusing eye.
I thirst for accusation. All that was sung.
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Breed out of the contagion of the throng,
Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.”
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