The Quartermaster's Store

While this great old humorous song is probably most closely tied to the scouting movement, especially the Boy Scouts, it actually got its start with the army, either at the time of the Civil War, or more likely in the first World War. (And for those who may need to know what a quartermaster is, it is the officer and his or her staff that purchase and stock things for soldiers' needs.)

The fact that there were so many things in such stores opened the song up so that there are dozens of versions of the tune out there. We include six adapted nonsense verses here, and after each set of three verses there is the recurring lyrical chorus section that has survived more than 100 years simply because it is fun to sing, occasionally with harmony and sometimes a cappella. In all honesty, this section is a little tale unto itself that just kept showing up time after time as the song traveled through the decades and throughout the world.

Create your own verses - You will find that the six verses are simple and follow the same construction. Your singers will enjoy adding their own, and/or replacing our verses with their own. Here are a few we have seen:

• There were snakes... big as garden rakes...
• There are beans... big as submarines...
• There are clocks... that smell like football socks...
• There is tea... but not for you and me...
• There are goats... eating artichokes

Of course, you can change some rhythms to help your rhyme scheme, but that's a lesson unto itself. And, as we discovered in our writing, you can try to rewrite the lyrical chorus section, but we never found anything we enjoyed more than the original.