"Arabian riff", also known as "The Streets of Cairo", "The Poor Little Country Maid", and "the snake charmer song", is a well-known melody, published in different forms in the 19th century. [1] Alternate titles for children's songs using this melody include "The Girls in France" and "The Southern Part of France". [2] [3] The melody is often associated with the hoochie coochie belly dance.
There is a clear resemblance between the riff and the French song Colin prend sa hotte (published by Christophe Ballard in 1719), whose first five notes are identical. Colin prend sa hotte appears to derive from the lost Kradoudja, an Algerian folk song of the 17th century. [4] [5]
A version of the riff was published in 1845 by Franz Hünten as Melodie Arabe. [6] The melody was described as an "Arabian Song" in the La grande méthode complète de cornet à piston et de saxhorn par Arban , first published in the 1850s. [1]
Sol Bloom, a showman (and later a U.S. congressman), published the song as the entertainment director of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. It included an attraction called "A Street in Cairo" produced by Gaston Akoun, which featured snake charmers, camel rides and a scandalous dancer known as Little Egypt. Songwriter James Thornton penned the words and music to his own version of this melody, "Streets Of Cairo or The Poor Little Country Maid". Copyrighted in 1895, it was made popular by his wife Lizzie Cox, who used the stage name Bonnie Thornton. [7] [2] The oldest known recording of the song is from 1895, performed by Dan Quinn (Berliner Discs 171-Z). [8]
The song was also recorded as "They Don't Wear Pants in the Southern Part of France" by John Bartles, the version sometimes played by radio host Dr. Demento.
In France, there is a song which pieds-noirs from Algeria brought back in the 1960s called "Travadja La Moukère" (from trabaja la mujer, which means "the woman works" in Spanish), which uses the same riff.
Partial lyrics:
Travadja La Moukère | Work, woman |
Since the piece is not copyrighted, it has been used as a basis for numerous songs, especially in the early 20th century:
It appears on following computer and video games:
The tune is used for a 20th-century American children's song with – like many unpublished songs of child folk culture – countless variations as the song is passed from child to child over considerable lengths of time and geography, the one constant being that the versions are almost always smutty. One variation, for example, is:
There's a place in France
Where the ladies wear no pants
But the men don't care
'cause they don't wear underwear. [2] [3]
or a similar version:
There's a place in France
Where the naked ladies dance
There's a hole in the wall
Where the men can see it all.
Another World War II-era variation is as follows:
When your mind goes blank
And you're dying for a wank
And Hitler's playing snooker with your balls
In the German nick
They hang you by your dick
And put dirty pictures on the walls.
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Little Egypt was the stage name for at least three popular belly dancers from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. With countless imitators, the name became synonymous with belly dancers.
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Snake charming is the practice of appearing to hypnotize a snake by playing and waving around an instrument called a pungi. A typical performance may also include handling the snakes or performing other seemingly dangerous acts, as well as other street performance staples, like juggling and sleight of hand. The practice was historically the profession of some tribesmen in India well into the 20th century but snake charming declined rapidly after the government banned the practice in 1972. Snake-charmer performances still happen in other Asian nations such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Malaysia. The tradition is also practiced in North African countries of Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia.
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The hoochie coochie is a catch-all term to describe several sexually provocative belly dance-like dances from the mid-to late 1800s. Also spelled hootchy-kootchy and a number of other variations, it is often associated with "The Streets of Cairo, or the Poor Little Country Maid" song, also known as "the snake charmer song". "Hoochie Coochie Man" is also a blues standard written by Willie Dixon and first recorded by Muddy Waters in Chicago, January 7, 1954. Numerous cover versions of this classic continue to be recorded. Hoochie Coochie is also mentioned in Alan Jackson's hit country music song "Chattahoochee", and the Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller songs "Little Egypt (Ying-Yang)" and "Saved".
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In compiling his collection of melodies Arban clearly wanted to present music from all the civilized nations he could think of. It is thus in the service of a truncated ethnic inclusiveness that he included an "Arabian Song"—or, more likely, the one-and-only "Arabian Song" he knew... Beyond this, the opening five notes of this song are identical to the first five notes of Colin Prend Sa Hotte, published in Paris in 1719. Writing in 1857, J. B. Wekerlin noted that the first phrase of that song is almost identical to Kradoutja, a now-forgotten Arabic or Algerian melody that had been popular in France since 1600. This song may thus have been in the European meme pool 250 years before Arban found it. It may even be a Middle Eastern song, or a mutation of one, that came to Europe via North Africa through Moorish Spain or was brought back from one of the Crusades.
The opening five notes, including harmony and meter, are identical to the opening five notes of the song Colin Prend Sa Hotte in J.B. Christophe Ballard, Brunettes ou Petits Airs Tendres (Paris, 1719)....In J.B. Wekerlin, Échos du Temps Passé (Paris, 1857), ...the song is represented as a 'Chanson à danser' with the comment that the first phrase of the melody resembles almost note for note an Algerian or Arabic melody known as the Kradoutja, and that the melody has been popular in France since 1600. No printing of Kradoutja has been found.
