Meow Meow Meow
March 14, 2021 10:10 AM   Subscribe

If you're of a certain age, you probably still remember learning Señor Don Gato [sheet music .pdf link] in elementary music school class. Perhaps this animated video will remind you if you've forgotten. You may not know that the lyrics are translated from a Spanish song, but the melody has an entirely different source [lyrics with translation].

I wasn't able to find the recording from the record set that the teachers would play in class for students to sing along with, unfortunately. But that might have been too much of a nostalgia bomb.
posted by hippybear (33 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm of that certain age, and I catch myself absentmindedly singing Don Gato to myself while doing chores and whatnot.
The other tune that has stuck with me over the decades involves an innocent young lady who wants nothing more than to marry this returning soldier dude and he keeps putting her off with lame wardrobe excuses until he's scammed an entire new outfit from her and then he tells her that he's already married.
That one has always really annoyed me. With Don Gato I was always just sad about his little solar plexis.
posted by newpotato at 10:33 AM on March 14, 2021 [5 favorites]


Ooh, this takes me back. Now I need a styrofoam lunch tray with a Pizza Boat and some Orange Smiles. (Nice try, menu-writers! Our crack team of second-grade investigators knows plain old fruit when we see it!.)

I cannot imagine the furor if a teacher tried to use this song in an elementary school now, between parents shrieking about their child being traumatized and the religious right freaking out about the implications of a cat resurrection.

Meow meow meow.
posted by corey flood at 10:45 AM on March 14, 2021


I never heard this before. Now it is stuck in my head. (Not really complaining).
posted by eye of newt at 10:48 AM on March 14, 2021


A) Almost 40 years later and I still don't know exactly what a solar plexus is.
b) My son's class also sang this within the last few years, so it cat resurrection still flies in Massachusetts at least.
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 12:00 PM on March 14, 2021 [4 favorites]


Meow meow meow indeed!

I never learned the one about the returning soldier dude though, newpotato. Hah, a quest!
posted by inexorably_forward at 12:01 PM on March 14, 2021


I grew up in northern Illinois but I don't remember Don Gato coming back to life. The song always ended with Don Gato's death.
posted by Constance Mirabella at 12:02 PM on March 14, 2021 [1 favorite]


Sang a version of this in 1970's Australia, but I think it had an added chorus in triple time (borrowed from Granados perhaps?). And they changed the rhythm to make it sound like a seguidilla (maybe?) ...but could be misremembering both, it was a long time ago. According to this pdf it was 1978! Huh, would have guessed earlier.
posted by Coaticass at 1:06 PM on March 14, 2021


The Australian version probably came from the book referenced here. So a different translation and accompaniment and so on to the version known in the USA. Published in 1966, maybe my memory is not so wrong. And probably this would apply throughout the British Commonwealth.
posted by Coaticass at 1:15 PM on March 14, 2021


I remember thinking the song was too maudlin when I was a kid. I wouldn't have used that word, of course, but I have a distinct memory of us being in the sad part (after he has fallen off the roof or whatever) and thinking "why do we have to sing this?"
posted by anhedonic at 1:36 PM on March 14, 2021 [1 favorite]


Oh, soldier, soldier, will you marry me with your musket, fife and drum?
Oh no sweet maid I cannot marry thee for I have no hat to put on

So off she went to her grandfather's chest
and brought him a hat of the very, very best,
and the soldier put it on!

Oh, soldier, soldier, will you marry me with your musket, fife and drum?
Oh no sweet maid I cannot marry thee for I have no shirt to put on
etc.
posted by glasseyes at 1:41 PM on March 14, 2021


If you're of a certain age, you probably still remember learning...

If you are of a certain age, and a certain cultural background...

I feel excluded when posts assume that all readers are American.
posted by Thella at 1:55 PM on March 14, 2021


corey flood, an old school friend of mine who is now an elementary school music teacher still uses it.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:56 PM on March 14, 2021 [2 favorites]


Hunh, my wife is an elementary school music teacher, and she has only the vaguest notion of this song: “Sounds like some old-fashioned thing.”
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 2:23 PM on March 14, 2021 [1 favorite]


Also of that age.

The other one I remember is Sakura Sakura

ya yo i no so ra wa
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 3:53 PM on March 14, 2021 [3 favorites]


I feel excluded when posts assume that all readers are American.

I went to school in America and have never heard of this.

I can see how it is very earworm-y, though.
posted by madajb at 3:56 PM on March 14, 2021


This is one of those things that I always thought was universal in America, then was so completely laughed-at into thinking that it was regional-specific that my very first instinct on seeing this FPP was to check whether my brother posted it.

(He didn't)

(But hi, Mike.)
posted by Mchelly at 3:58 PM on March 14, 2021 [2 favorites]


So far what I've learned (culturally) in this thread is that northern Illinois is a very harsh place.
posted by inexorably_forward at 5:25 PM on March 14, 2021 [1 favorite]


I was born in 1965 and remember Don Gato. Along with a song about a skinny girl named Alice getting sucked down a bathtub drain and this rather problematic ditty. And every Halloween, our music teacher played a recording of Dans Macabre while showing us a filmstrip of skeletons rising from the grave and frolicking around the cemetery, which I'm sure caused a few nightmares.
posted by LindsayIrene at 5:38 PM on March 14, 2021


I just had a serious flashback to now gone* Reed Elementary, chorus room on the lower level, clutching purple ditto sheets and singing this.

*But like the cat apparently recently resurrected, behind the preserved facade of the old building.
posted by tavella at 7:00 PM on March 14, 2021


To this day, I’ve never met another American who remembers singing:
“Hokey pokey, penny a loaf, you taste before you buy,
Singing oh, what a merry land is England”
in primary school.

(With the expected resulting confusion between “merry land” and “Maryland.”)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:23 PM on March 14, 2021


Kelly Hogan's version from the terrific Bloodshot Records compilation "The Bottle Let Me Down".
posted by donpardo at 5:37 AM on March 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


We sang Don Gato in elementary school (late 80s, DC suburbs).
posted by jackbishop at 6:15 AM on March 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


By "of a certain age" do people mean new englanders in their 60's?
posted by eustatic at 6:42 AM on March 15, 2021


Hudson Valley, second grade, 1983? Good times.

I’m 45 now and today I learned that your solar plexus isn’t actually your butt.
posted by mochapickle at 6:43 AM on March 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


I am of a certain age and I don't remember it either. Did you learn it in Spanish class? I took German and our teacher played us songs from her collection of sappy German pop hits, which I only realized from a metafilter post a while back was Schlager.
posted by interplanetjanet at 7:35 AM on March 15, 2021


Almost 40 years later and I still don't know exactly what a solar plexus is.

Some boys in my class were adamant that it was his "rear end" (Central Illinois, late 1960s, fourth grade).

Because of this song, we named one of our childhood cats Don Gato.
posted by FencingGal at 12:39 PM on March 15, 2021


I was just singing this at work the other day, I looked up and my boss had a look of deep confusion and concern for my mental well being on his face. So I sang him the whole thing VERY dramatically to set him at ease.
posted by TheCoug at 3:16 PM on March 15, 2021 [9 favorites]


interplanetjanet, for me it was just regular music class, which we had... once a week I think? "This Land is Your Land" is another one we sang regularly.
posted by tavella at 6:13 PM on March 15, 2021


I learned this in school in either Eastern Oregon, or Eastern Washington, in the mid-70s. Regular music class, taught by kids I would call 'em now. Early 20s dudes or chicks. I understand that they had to have some leeway, as far as material went- I feel like we learned Bless the Beasts and the Children, and we definitely sang One Tin Soldier, which was a year or two old.
posted by hap_hazard at 9:31 PM on March 15, 2021


Regular music class here, too, along with songs like Fifty Nifty United States and (as my sister reminded me when I pointed her to this thread) the putatively Inuit song "Atekata Nuva" (which I actually found here)
posted by Mchelly at 8:17 AM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


Huh, I’m 32 and I vaguely recall learning this in third grade in the mid-1990s in Atlanta. I also recall looking up the definition of “solar plexus.”
posted by faineg at 4:30 PM on March 16, 2021


Yeah, I remember this and it seems like something I encountered in school (1980's in metro Atlanta). Although its possible it wasn't at school.
posted by thefoxgod at 7:03 PM on March 16, 2021


There was an old lady of some certain age,
At a much younger stage,
She read off a page,
‘Bout a Latino cat,
Who fell and went splat.
His poor solar plexus,
How it did affect us!
She sang in her class
Of the cat’s busted ass,
But I don’t know why
She swallowed the fly;
Meow meow meow meow.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:21 PM on March 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


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