The Mystery of The Cannibal King

Trina shared some of her grandpa's crazy-ass old-timey songs, and while some of them helped to explain how she got where she is today, a few of them I recognized from my own impressionable youth. But one of the songs absent from her list has been running through my head lately, and as is the case with such things, I can't get it out until I pass it along to someone else. If you or anyone you know has an AARP card, then you've probably sang, or were forcibly made to listen to someone else sing, about the enigmatic Cannibal King.

The Cannibal King, the legend goes, had a big nose ring. The king falls in love, but after that, the legend gets a bit hazy. My dad, and to a lesser extent, his sister, always used to sing this song, but apart from them, I'd never heard it anywhere else. Ever. It's been a while since I heard it, but I think it went something like this:

Oh, the Cannibal King
With the big nose ring
Fell in love with the dusting maid.
And every night by the mellow moonlight
Across the lake he came

He hugged and kissed his pretty little miss
Under the bamboo tree,
And every night in the mellow moonlight,
It sounded like this to me
Arr-Rump (kiss)(kiss)
Arr-Rump (kiss)(kiss)
Under the bamboo tree
Arr-Rump (kiss)(kiss)
Arr-Rump (kiss)(kiss)
Under the bamboo tree

We'll build a bungalow big enough for two,
Big enough for two, my darling, big enough for two
And when we're married happy we'll be,
Under the bamboo, under the bamboo tree

If you'll be m-i-n-e, mine...I'll be t-h-i-n-e, thine
And I'll l-o-v-e, love you...all the t-i-m-e, time

I guess you can't tell by reading it, but the song inexplicably changes melody after each little section, at least the way my dad does it. So it's like a bunch of mini-songs, like the second half of Abbey Road. Like I said, I'd never heard it anywhere else, but thanks to the internet, I've found hundreds of sites that list the lyrics to this song. Apparently everyone over fifty knows this song. And nearly every one of them knows slightly different words.

With seemingly no author on record, people have taken to changing the words all willy-nilly to whatever they want. Sometimes ol' Cannibal King falls in love with a dusty maid, or a dusky maid. Sometimes it's a sweet young maid. At least one time it was a husky maid. And sometimes it's a maiden, which puts a totally different image in your head. I think I prefer dusting maid, because it's a pretty good adjective for the maid/service profession. According to some guy named David Lynch, who almost certainly isn't the weirdo director by the same name, the original lyric was "dusky," but was changed in the mid-sixties to "very young," because dusky was sort of...overtly racist. He says the correct "dusky" is sometimes misheard as "dusting." But the hell with him. Fake David Lynch.

The moonlight could alternately be described as pale moonlight, but mellow moonlight has a nice ring to it. A big nose ring.And the weird noises that the singer hears change with virtually every version, from Karumph to Boom Boom. Sometimes it's not even under a bamboo tree; the weird noises are followed by...even more weird noises.

Why can't these people make up there minds? Who is this Cannibal King? And who does he really fall in love with? Is it a black chick, or the maid? And not that I really want to know, but what kind of filthy noises did they make under the bamboo tree? I can only imagine what "harrumph" is supposed to be. And, being a cannibal and all, is he like, taking a bite out of her? This song raises more questions than it answers.