Way Down Yonder in the Holler Tree

I'm surely not the only one with a huge soft spot for Chubby Parker's sweet, cheerfully violent folk classic "King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O," a variation on the Elizabethan-era "Froggy went a-courting" ballad immortalized by Harry Smith's original Anthology of American Folk Music. Trotting along placidly amid Parker's whistling and light banjo picking, and delivered in his similarly light, unflappable tenor, the song's verses render a version of the famous inter-species courtship tale that climaxes with Mr. Frog's slaughtering his rival suitors (followed by a blithe "happily ever after" ending), but which—thanks to the endlessly repeated non-lexical vocables that give the song its title and a chorus featuring more of the same—unfolds at a teasingly slow pace. We're halfway through the song and the courtship when some rivals enter, and look how long it takes for this to play out:

Miss Mouse had suitors three or four

King kong kitchie kitchie ki-me-o

And there they came right in the door

King kong kitchie kitchie ki-me-o

Ki-mo-kee-mo-ki-mo-kee

Way down yonder in the hollow tree

An owl and a bat and a bumblebee

King kong kitchie kitchie ki-me-o

They grabbed Mister Frog and began to fight

King kong kitchie kitchie ki-me-o

In that hollow tree 'twas a terrible night

King kong kitchie kitchie ki-me-o

Ki-mo-kee-mo-ki-mo-kee

Way down yonder in the hollow tree

An owl and a bat and a bumblebee

King kong kitchie kitchie ki-me-o

Mister Frog hurled the suitors to the floor

King kong kitchie kitchie ki-me-o

With his sword and his pistol he killed all four

King kong kitchie kitchie ki-me-o

That's a lot of dosey-do to convey three essential verbs: They came, they rassled, Frog prevailed. Indeed the hypnotic repetition of the title phrase and the chorus means we get just two lines of forward action in every eight-line form. Add in the whistling break after each chorus, and the suspense is almost excruciating. It gets me every time.

Speaking of the chorus, it's one of a few mysteries about this song that haunt me. Are the owl, bat, and bumblebee invoked in each iteration the rival suitors who will die at Frog's hand? Possibly, except that the song says he "killed all four" of the "three or four" on hand. Either way it's an unshakeably vivid image, three winged creatures of widely varying size all crammed into a tree, going at each other—except you'll note that the chorus has no verbs in it, not even a "were" to place them at the scene, let alone one to describe their conflict. Between that and the confusion about the number of them present, accounted for, and dispatched, I'm not entirely sure what their relation is to the rest of the song.

And speaking of those non-lexical vocables—i.e., nonsense words—I'm intrigued by an odd bit of synchronicity. Parker's recording dates from 1928, a full five years before a certain iconic film and book about a giant ape from Skull Island was unleashed on the world. Is it a coincidence that the words "King Kong" feature in these two great American artifacts? As best I can tell, absolutely. And yet somewhere in the collective unconscious, somewhere between a deadly battle in a hollow tree and another on the Empire State Building, between one inter-species romance and another, there is a kind of cosmic linguistic jape going on, and I for one can't unhear it.