Pop Goes the Weasel

The tradition & historical record

"Pop! Goes the Weasel" (Roud 5249) is a traditional old English song, a country dance, nursery rhyme, and singing game that emerged in the mid-19th century. The melody is often used in jack-in-the-box toys and is frequently played by ice cream trucks. ²

In the early 1850s, Miller and Beacham of Baltimore published sheet music for "Pop goes the Weasel for Fun and Frolic". This is the oldest known source that pairs the name to this tune. Miller and Beacham's music was a variation of "The Haymakers", a tune dating back to the 1700s. Gow's Repository of the Dance Music of Scotland (1799 to 1820), included "The Haymakers" as a country dance or jig. One modern expert believes the tune, like most jigs, originated in the 1600s. In June 1852, the boat Pop Goes The Weasel competed in the Durham Regatta. By December 1852, "Pop Goes The Weasel" was a popular social dance in England. A ball held in Ipswich on 13 December 1852 ended with "a country dance, entitled 'Pop Goes the Weasel', one of the most mirth inspiring dances which can well be imagined." On 24 December 1852, an ad in the Birmingham Journal offered lessons in the "Pop Goes The Weasel" dance, described as a "highly fashionable Dance, recently introduced at her Majesty's and the Nobility's private soirees". On 28 December 1852, an advertisement in The Times promoted a publication that included "the new dance recently introduced with such distinguished success at the Court balls" and contained "the original music and a full explanation of the figures by Mons. E. Coulon". Eugène Coulon was a well-known dance-master. In January 1853, the Bath Chronicle featured an advertisement from dance master, Mr. T. B. Moutrie, for "instruction in the highly fashionable dances" including "Pop Goes the Weasel". Sheet music dated 1853 at the British Library describes it as "An Old English Dance, as performed at Her Majesty's & The Nobilities Balls, with the Original Music". ²

On 24 December 1852, the Gloucester Journal newspaper reported that "A new dance has been introduced by a Frenchman—it is called 'Pop goes the Weasel', and from the title should be a comical affair". That Frenchman was probably either Eugène Coulon or Louis-Antoine Jullien, as four days later in The Times, London, music publishers Jullien & Co. advertised "Pop goes the Weasel: the new dance recently introduced ...is now published with the original music and a full explanation of the figures, by Mons. E. Coulon." In a later advertisement George Thompson is named as the arranger of the music. Adding support to Coulon's role is an advertisement from a dance teacher, Madame Catarina St. Louin, offering lessons in the "latest and most fashionable dances, including "Pop goes the Weasel", "La Tempéte", and "Coulon's Quadrille", by permission of M. Eugène Coulon, as lately introduced by him at Her Majesty's and the Nobility's Balls". The Jullien & Co. publication with the original music arranged by George Thompson is the oldest known music for the dance. In it Coulon described Pop goes the Weasel "as a very old and a very animated English dance that has lately been revived among the higher classes of society", and as his instructions were soon copied by other music publishers, with and without attribution, he appears to have been the authority for the dance. ²

The lyrics may have predated the dance as either a rhyme or the lyrics of another song dating to the 1600s. Regardless, there are many different versions of the lyrics. In England, most versions share the basic verse: ²

The most common additional verses are: ²

When the song crossed the Atlantic in the 1850s, the British lyrics were still changing. In the United States, the most common lyrics are different and may have a separate origin. The following lyrics were printed in Boston in 1858: ²

The March 1860 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger published a new verse: ²

In New York in 1901, the opening lines were, "All around the chicken coop / The possum chased the weasel." By the mid-20th century, the standard United States version had replaced the "cobbler's bench" with a "mulberry bush": ²

Or the standard United States version had this line. ²

In 1994, the American Folklife Center documented a version of the song with sixteen verses. ²

There has been much speculation about the meaning of the phrase and song title, "Pop Goes the Weasel". Some say a weasel is a tailor's flat iron, silver-plate dishes, a dead animal, a hatter's tool, or a spinner's weasel. One writer notes, "Weasels do pop their heads up when disturbed and it is quite plausible that this was the source of the name of the dance." Just like the dancers to this jig, the spinner's weasel revolves, but to measure the thread or yarn produced on a spinning wheel. Forty revolutions of most weasels produce eighty yards (73 m) of yarn or a skein. The weasel's wooden gears are designed to make a popping sound after the 40th revolution to tell the spinner that the skein is completed. Iona and Peter Opie observed that no one seemed to know what the phrase meant at the height of the dance craze in the 1850s. It may just be a nonsensical phrase. However, one further explanation links the lyrics of the popular nursery rhyme to the East London colloquial dialect of the 1800's, known as "Cockney Rhyming Slang". In this dialect "weasel" relates to "weasel and stoat", or coat, and "pop" relates the "pop shop" or pawnbrokers shop. The rhyme describes someone running short of money purchasing rice and treacle (metaphor for life's essentials); "that's the way the money goes". Subsequently, this forces them to sell (pop) their coat (weasel) to the pawnbroker (pop shop). ²

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Pop Goes the Weasel”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ²

Pop Goes the Weasel is folk song, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ¹

The source record links this tradition to 4 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ¹