Fifty years ago I was in a decidedly amateur madrigal group. We each had a copy of The A Cappella Singer and we met at each other’s houses to bushwhack our way through the score. A madrigal is performed without accompaniment, which meant we started with a proper note from a pitch pipe and veered creatively from there. Madrigals are usually written in four- or five-part harmony, or more, if you include my own voice range, which was once a reliable second soprano but had been spelunking its way into baritone territory for a while at that point.

People nowadays, with their sad little duck lips and buttock injections, probably think of the Renaissance era as being somewhat prudish. I doubt it. They’re thinking of the Texas legislature. The madrigal singers sang about let’s-call-it-love a lot. The men wore tight pants and made elaborate low “While you’re down there, could you do a girl a favor” bows to the women. The women wore gowns with their business portions well tucked away under voluminous scaffolding; meanwhile their tight and skimpy décolletage presented their titties like hors-d’oeuvres on a platter. I’m thinking these people were randy as hell.

And a lot of the madrigals that have survived to this day appear to recognize that. “Fa la la” and the like are the fifteenth-century substitute for Bleep. Now is the month of Maying, when merry lads are playing, fa la la la la la la la la, fa la la la la la la. We know what they mean.

So our little group was pumped when someone brought in a new round to sing. Think “Row, row, row your boat,” wherein everyone sings the same melody but leaps in at different times, like Double-Dutch jump-rope. The notes to the score insisted that the innocuous lyrics became quite risqué when the various parts overlapped. It was high humor in the Middle Ages. Oh boy! We set to it.

I want to dress. Pray call my maid and let my things be quickly laid.

LAID! There’s a starting point.

What does Your Ladyship please to wear? Your bombazine? ’T’is ready here.

Keep going.

See here! See here this monstrous tear! Oh Fie! It is not fit to wear!

Well. We sang it together, we stopped to hear what words were colliding lewdly against other words, we determined…nothing. We had “laid.” What else? Monstrous Bombas? That sounds dirty. But ultimately, we could not nail it down. It was fossil humor, and no matter how carefully we chipped away at it, it crumbled.

But this reminded me of Louie Louie. The Kingsmen’s version of that song came out when I was about ten. Me and my neighbor Susie knew it was dirty and we spent all summer trying to figure out the lyrics. That wasn’t as easy as it might sound these days. We had to wait until it came on the radio, and that meant every couple hours. Then shush each other with our ears pressed onto our transistor radios. Ultimately we decided there was “I fucked all girls, all kinda ways,” and at the end “I’ll take her in my arms again, I’ll tell her I’ll never lay her again,” which, in retrospect, was exceedingly unlikely, and also, we (okay, I) didn’t really know what any of those words meant. But they were dirty, and that was good enough for me.

That was not true of Louie Louie, which was quite innocuous, but that’s when it hit me. So was our madrigal! This was a perfectly serviceable dumb canon that was fun to sing, and the children around the fire watched their elders (you know, their seventeen-year-old elders) sing and giggle, and the kids who figured it was dirty. And they’re the ones who passed that bit of lore down the centuries to our music score.

And that’s how rumors get started. Who buried Paul?

Here’s the spooky part. The Internet has never heard of the bombazine song, even though several people of my acquaintance can sing the whole thing. I have put in the lyrics, one line at a time, and nothing shows up. I think the Texas Legislature got ahold of it.