• it/its

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I attended a Christian summer camp for many years during my childhood, and while it didn't bring me closer to Jesus, it did give me:

  • a weird scar on my knee
  • an attraction to women
  • a strange but enduring affinity toward a particular brand of campfire song
I feel like this is one those "if you know, you know" type things, but campfire songs are their own type of song. They are meant to be sung in a group, for starters, which means that they have a lot of sing-and-repeat parts, call-and-answer parts, or the chorus has very few words or maybe even memorable nonsense syllables so that anyone could participate, even without having heard the song before.

Second, they had to be loooooooong. You had to entertain children from dinner time until bedtime, and there was nothing to do except this. The more verses the better, and I'm pretty sure some of the verses were invented on the spot.

Finally, and most importantly, they had to be bad. They had to be the type of song you will never hear anywhere else because you'd be embarrassed to hear it anywhere else, and anyone else would embarrassed to sing it anywhere else.

For some reason I love those songs.

The one I remember, if not most fondly, then at least most loudly, was, I assume, titled "Funky Chicken". This song bears no resemblance to the dance performed at weddings. This is a song intended to be screamed at the top of one's lungs until one's voice gives out. Furthermore, because the only thing required to invent new verses was to think of basically any word and an accompanying hand gesture, I'm sure that we sang this for at least fifteen minutes a night.

You start with a solid beat of hand claps, then the song leader (for us it was a gaggle of camp counselors because just one could not maintain that energy) would yell out at the top of their lungs

LET ME SEE YOUR FUNKY CHICKEN!

And the kids, in turn, would respond

WHAT'S THAT YOU SAY?

The counselor(s) would say again, as if incredulous that we hadn't heard them the first time

I SAID LET ME SEE YOUR FUNKY CHICKEN!

And we would again reply

WHAT'S THAT YOU SAY?

And then there followed what was known as the breakdown. This is where it got real quiet for some reason, and you could tell which direction the wind was blowing based on the coughing from one side of the fire, and we would all break out the appropriate hand gesture.

For the funky chicken verse this was obviously the "tuck hands under arms and flap about" motion. For other verses it was different.

So we would flap around and quietly say

funnnky chicken, fun funky chicken. funnnky chicken, fun funky chicken.

At which point the screaming would resume with a different item we were supposed to let the song leader "see".

I don't know why this has stuck with me for so long but that type of campfire song is one of the only regrets I have about not having children.


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