Miss Lucy had a baby

[10][11] The song is often combined or confused with the similar but cruder "Miss Susie had a steamboat", which uses the same tune and was also used as a jump-rope game.

[12][need quotation to verify] The history of the Miss Susie similar rhyme has been studied, tracing it back to the 1950s, in Josepha Sherman's article published by the American Folklore Society.

In those songs, the baby, that was dropped in the chamber pot bathtub, was referencing an enormously popular mascot of Force cereal named Sunny Jim, introduced in the United States in 1902 and in Britain a few years later.

Following his declining popularity, the baby is now usually encountered as Tiny Tim, once famous as a Depression-era comic strip and still well known as a character in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

The opening lines now often change to "My mother had a baby..." or "I had a little brother..."[8] The variants including a woman with an alligator purse urging the baby's mother to vote have been seen as a reference to Susan B. Anthony, an American suffragette,[7] It was later attributed to a social worker[17] which was their typical dress code in the 1950s[18] A version of the song appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's 1964 film Marnie, about a woman overcoming a childhood trauma.