YOU put your right hand in,
You put your right hand out,
You put your right hand in
And you shake it all about.
You do the Hokey Cokey
And you turn around;
That’s what it’s all about.
You put your left hand in,
You put your left hand out,
You put your left hand in
And you shake it all about.
You do the Hokey Cokey
And you turn around;
That’s what it’s all about.
You put your right leg in,
You put your right leg out,
You put your right leg in
And you shake it all about.
You do the Hokey Cokey
And you turn around;
That’s what it’s all about.
You put your left leg in,
You put your left leg out,
You put your left leg in
And you shake it all about.
You do the Hokey Cokey
And you turn around;
That’s what it’s all about.
A popular party song the world over, this always reminds me of the story of the poor chap who wrote it and the day they buried him. Apparently, after preparing his body at the funeral parlour, they tried to lift him into a coffin. But as soon as they put his left leg in everything went wrong for them.
The general belief is that Charles Macak, Tafit Baker and Larry LaPrise wrote the American version of the song, ‘The Hokey Pokey’, in 1949 to entertain skiers at the Sun Valley resort in Idaho, USA. But the song is older than that. For a start, ‘The Hokey Cokey’ was a well-known British wartime music-hall song, first credited to Jimmy Kennedy, the composer of other enduring hits such as ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. British bandleader Gerry Hoey also claimed authorship in 1940 of a similar tune, ‘The Hoey Oka’.
The origins of the song go back much further than that, however. Some argue that Hokey Cokey is a corruption of the ‘hocus pocus’ beloved of magicians, an expression that derives, in turn, from the words of the Catholic Mass, hoc corpus meum, ‘this is my body’, indicating the conversion of the Communion ‘bread’ into the body of Christ. The Puritans, against anything that could be construed as idolatrous (see Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross), mocked the accompanying words as a kind of magical incantation.
The dance that goes with the song – in which the participants all dance in a ring, putting the relevant limb in and out, and then shaking it about – goes back a fair way too. Similar dances and songs were recorded in Robert Chambers’s Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826), and other versions have been traced to seventeenth-century minstrels. ‘The Hokey Cokey’ would appear to parody the religious rituals of the Shakers (so named for their jerky movements while engaged in worship), who both danced and sang during their services. But the earliest accurate record, so far, of the song we all know and love is from an account, dated 1857, of two sisters from Canterbury in England, on a trip to Bridgewater, New Hampshire. During their visit they taught the locals a song that went something like this:
I put my right hand in,
I put my right hand out,
I give my hand a shake, shake, shake,
And turn myself about.
Apparently the performance of the song – called ‘Right Elbow In’ and several verses long – was accompanied by ‘appropriate gestures’ and danced with a slow, rhythmic motion. Whether or not an earlier reference will be found, it seems that the origins of ‘The Hokey Cokey’ do not lie in America, as currently claimed; the song was merely exported there.