The Lobster Song

Time for some light-hearted humour. The Lobster Song is one of those gloriously ridiculous comic folk songs that somehow managed to survive for centuries while respectable society tried very hard to pretend it didn’t exist. I first learned this version back in 1967 from the great storyteller and singer Taffy Thomas (we were on the same college course), though there were already several variants circulating at the time. Some were fairly tame pub versions like this one; others — especially the rugby club renditions — were considerably more ribald and are probably best left to the post-midnight sessions and heavily fortified singers. What fascinated me when I researched the song later was just how old it really is. Songs of this type can be traced back at least four hundred years. Scholars connect The Lobster Song to an older family of comic songs known variously as The Crabfish, The Sea Crabb, Johnny Daddlum, and The Crayfish. The oldest surviving ancestor may even appear in the famous Percy Folio manuscript from around 1620. The basic plot has hardly changed in all that time. Someone buys a suspiciously lively shellfish. The creature is placed in a chamber pot beneath the bed. A midnight disaster follows. Chaos erupts. Furniture flies. Dignity evaporates completely. Clearly, some themes are timeless. Like many slightly risque comic songs, it survived less through printed books than through oral tradition — passed around pubs, sailors’ gatherings, rugby clubs, barrack rooms, and later the folk revival itself. Victorian collectors often ignored songs like this because they were considered too vulgar for polite publication, which ironically helped preserve their rough comic energy. For this video, I decided not to treat the song with historical realism. Instead, the montage embraces the broad cartoon spirit that the song itself practically demands. The illustrations lean toward exaggerated caricature, seaside postcard humour, comic-strip chaos, and music-hall absurdity — complete with enormous lobsters, panicking householders, and escalating domestic catastrophe. Musically, I’ve kept the arrangement deliberately lively and singable, in the spirit of the old folk-club chorus songs where audiences could join in after hearing the refrain only once or twice. And yes — if you listen carefully enough — you may still hear faint echoes of those uproarious rugby-club performances lurking somewhere beneath the surface. So here it is: four centuries of shellfish-based folk nonsense, cheerfully staggering onward into the twenty-first century.