Guitar: Pop Goes The Weasel (Including lyrics and chords)
I was watching Gareth Malone's "The Choir" a couple of nights ago and picked up a couple of songs from it.
This one was the song he used for his first audition with City Bankers and is an old nursery rhyme.
There are a number of interpretations of the lyrics, the one I like best being that it is Cockney Rhyming Slang and refers to times when less fortunate people would pawn (pop) their Sunday best coat at the beginning of the week to be able to afford to buy things, but redeem it for the following Sunday. Items bought in the song are 'rice and treacle', but also inferred 'booze'. In Cockney Rhyming Slang, a 'weasel' was a coat, coming from 'weasel and stoat'.
There are some very quick chord changes in this song at times, so to make it easier, in the section where Am and G are alternating, I only pluck strings 4,3 and 2 and simply lift off the fingers of the left hand for the G chord, i.e. play the open strings.
Prior to March 2017, I added the lyrics and chords to my videos using YouTube annotations. However, YouTube decided to make annotations obsolete at that time as they did not work on mobile phones, so since then I have been adding them using my own video editor app.
YouTube did promise that annotations that already existed on videos would still be visible on PCs, but they seem to have changed their minds on that and they are no longer visible.
Consequently, if you are watching a video uploaded before 2017, annotations are not available so I am adding them below.
If you are not able to get the annotations, send me an email and I will let you have the file from my own collection. [email protected]
Pop Goes the Weasel
C G C G C
Half a pound of tuppeny rice half a pound of treacle
G F C F G C
That’s the way the money goes. Pop goes the weasel.
Am G Am G Am G Am G Am G C
Up and down the ci – ty road, in and out the Eagle
F C F C F G C G C
That’s the way the money goes. Pop goes the weasel.
Every night when I go out the weasel’s on the table
Take a stick and knock it off. Pop goes the weasel.
Up and down the ci – ty road, in and out the Eagle
That’s the way the money goes. Pop goes the weasel.