This cheerful, seemingly simple song is far from simple and not even all that cheerful. I’ll have to admit up front here that my rabbit trails petered out before any definitive conclusions were reached. But here’s what I was able to come up with:
Let’s start out with the original nursery rhyme about a crooked man and his various crooked accoutrements:
There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,
(or, in some versions, he had a crooked smile,)
(or, in some versions, he had a crooked smile,)
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.