"The worms they crept in"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 16, 2004, at 3:44 PM, Patty Davies wrote:

> Hello George - as soon as I read this line, I remembered this from my
> elementary school years, in Ventura County (Santa Paula) in Southern
> California.  This would have been around 1962-1963.  There were a
> couple
> verses and there was a real sing-song way we used to recite it:
>
>   The worms crept in, the worms crept out
>    in your mouth and out your snout
>
> There were more verses than this and I used to know them all :)   It
> definitely had to do with dead bodies.

from the 1940s, in southeastern pennsylvania:

The worms creep in, the worms creep out;
They play pinochle in your snout.

[there was a lot more, but i'm just pleased to have recovered the
pinochle reference.]

google turns up nothing on this version, but it does turn up a folksong
("Lady All Skin and Bones" or "The Lady of Skin and Bone"), said to be
based on a medieval homiletic poem, with a verse:

And she walked up, and she walked down,
And spied a dead man upon the ground.
And from his nose unto his chin,
The worms crept out, and the worms crept in.

i don't find anything in a quick search of some of the opies' books.

arnold, note present tense in my (obviously more modern) version
   [if someone *really* needs my version, i could get the whole thing
from a childhood friend, who unfortunately isn't available by e-mail,
though we could exchange mail the old-fashioned way]