ROUND AND ROUND HITLER'S GRAVE

(WOODY GUTHRIE/MILLARD LAMPELL/PETE SEEGER)

Tune: "OLD JOE CLARK"

THE ALMANAC SINGERS, 1942: BESS HAWES, PETE SEEGER, MILLARD LAMPELL, WOODY GUTHRIE, ARTHUR STERN, SIS CUNNINGHAM (left to right)

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"Round and Round Hitler's Grave" is Seeger's wartime spin on "Old Joe Clark;" Guthrie wrote the Mussolini verse....

Ronald D. Cohen & Dave Samuelson, liner notes for "Songs for Political Action," Bear Family Records BCD 15720 JL, 1996, p. 96.

Lyrics as recorded by THE ALMANAC SINGERS, New York, NY, c. Feb 1942, and reprinted ibid., p. 104
(Minor corrections by Manfred Helfert).

Alternate and additional lyrics (from an undated mimeographed songbook, "Anti-Fascist Songs of the Almanac Singers") in italics/parentheses.

ORIGINAL ISSUE: "DEAR MR. PRESIDENT," Keynote K-306-A (KEYNOTE ALBUM 111), 1942.
[PETE SEEGER, lead vocal]

• DOWNLOAD AND LISTEN to an excerpt of the song performed during "This Is War" broadcast, Feb 1942.

Promotional use of soundfiles by kind permission of Jeff Place, Smithsonian Folkways.

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Now I wished I had a bushel
Wished I had a peck
Wished I had old Hitler
With a rope around his neck.

Hey, round, round Hitler's grave
Round, round we go
Gonna lay that poor boy down
He won't get up no more.

Mussolini [Hermann Goering] won't last long
Tell you the reason why
We're a-gonna salt his beef
And hang it up to dry.

The German army general staff
I guess they missed connection
Went a hundred miles a day
But in the wrong direction.

I'm a-goin' to Berlin
To Mister Hitler's town
I'm gonna take my forty-four
And blow his playhouse down.

How Hitler went to Russia
In search of Russian oil
But the only oil he'll find there
Is a pot in which he'll boil.

[Hitler said to Goering
Here's what he did say
I can't understand this Russian snow,
It's getting too hot for me.]

Now Mister Hitler's traveling mighty fast
But he's on a one-way [single] track
Started down that Moscow road
But now he's coming back.

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