WHEN THE RED, RED ROBIN...
by Bryce Martin


A grasshopper sat on a railroad track,
He looked at me and I looked back.
I picked up a brickbat and hit him in the shin,
He said, "Oh, Lord a'mercy, don't do that again."

Grandma quoted snippets of English nursery rhymes and songs while working the treadle on her sewing machine or baking a wild blackberry cobbler in the wood cook stove.

"My father was Johnny Bull," she said. "I get it from him, but I leave out the 'Bloody this' and the 'Bloody that' he was so fond of."

Johnny Bull is a name meant to represent England or an English person. Her father was born in England.

Grandma's most common phrase was "Lord a'mercy."

Her most vocalized non-gospel song was "Sing a Song of Sixpence."

Sing a song of sixpence
A pocket full of rye;
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie

Blackbird pie was common in her household while growing up. She remembered the traps set in the yards for the birds by her mother and the meat pies that followed. That particular song, however, was as much a riddle as anything else. She said she no longer remembered what it all meant.

"I'm not much for remembering anything anymore," she would say. "Time takes its toll on the mind and body, and it has taken its toll on mine."

I have always been a stickler for detail, even at a young age. Grandma loved birds and flowers, and the four seasons. One of the first signs of spring was the robin. When you saw robins with their swelled chests darting across the lawn or flying in one of those haphazard group formations they deploy, you knew spring was here.

The problem I had with detail came about when Grandma would recite one of the many British poems or songs concerning their national bird, the robin redbreast. That is what I had a problem with: Robins have an orange, not a red breast. I did not understand songs that had lines such as: "When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin' along."

Much later, I discovered that American Robins do have orange breasts -- and British robins have a red breast. Most all of the songs and poems about the robin were Old World works; hence, they all mention a red breast. Therefore, the answer to my problem was the fact that people in America, including my grandmother, were essentially making mention of British robins when the specimens at hand were American robins.

One legend has it that a robin tried to pull the thorns from Christ's crown, and drops of blood fell on the Robin's light-colored chest. There is also the Christmas story about the night Christ was born and about the little brown bird that shared the stable with the Holy Family. A fire Joseph built to keep the family warm burned out during the night. The bird quickly flew down from its nest and fanned the embers with its wings. The heat from the fire turned the bird's feathers red. The breast of the robin was red from then on to remind us of its love for the baby Jesus.

Doris Day had a hit with the song about the "red robin bobbin' along" in 1953 when I was 10 years old. That was in America, of course. The songwriter, if American, was not observant or was using artistic license to its fullest. On the other hand, maybe the songwriter was aware that nothing rhymes with orange.