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Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass (Three Chinamen With A Double Bass) is a popular nonsensical German children's song. It constitutes a very simple form of wordplay. While the lyrics remain in effect unchanged, all the vowels are interchanged by all the vowels, umlauts and diphthongs found in the German language with every consecutive stanza.

Melody

The most widely used tune today is as follows, slight variations in the dotted quarter notes are not uncommon:

Listen

A slightly different tune used to be more common in Germany and still prevails in Western Austria and the German speaking part of Switzerland:

Listen

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Note that in the ambitus is only a Perfect fifth in the latter but a Minor seventh in the former Variation.

Rules of the Game: Lyrics

The first stanza is sung in correct German:

Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass saßen auf der Straße und erzählten sich was. Da kam die Polizei, ei was ist denn das? Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass.

Three Chinamen with a double bass sat on the street and chatted along came the police: ‘Now what is this?‘ Three Chinesemen with a double bas.

At least eight stanzas follow, in which all the vowels are consecutively interchanged by the eight monophthongs found in the German language, following the order A, E, I, O, U, Ä, Ö, Ü. Thus, the second stanza goes

Dra Chanasan mat dam Kantrabass

saßan af dar Straßa and arzahltan sach was.
Da kam da Palaza, a, was ast dann das?

Dra Chanasan mat dam Kantrabass

Sometimes the game is extended to diphthongs (ai, au and so on). In another variation one of the players announces the next vowel change by shouting `Nochmal!` (Again!), or, rather nachmal, nechmel, etc.

History

As is the case with many children's songs, the origins of the song are difficult to determine. Germany's performance rights organization GEMA classifies it as a "copyright-free folksong".

However, the "Three Chinesemen" are of a relatively young date; even their direct forerunners cannot be traced back much further than the time of the First World War. For a song of such widespread popularity, written evidence is surprisingly scarce. .

Origin of Lyrics and Tune

Lyrics

The collected evidence suggests an origin of the song from the Northeast of the former German-speaking world. The protagonists of the version sung today are three Chinamen; this element first appears in a version recorded in 1922 in Tartu, a city in Estonia which until the end of WWII was home to a sizeable minority of Baltic Germans. However, most versions recorded before 1945 feature Japanesemen instead of Chinamen; this variant was first recorded in Pomerania in 1909. The regular form for "Japanese men" in German is Japaner, but for rhythmic reasons the somewhat outdated Japanesen was preferred. In 1913 the first printed version was published in Berlin with the title Drei Japanesen mit 'nem Bass. Not only the nationality of chatting Asians vary in the early versions, but also their number. Thus, a version recorded in Upper Silesia in 1928 has ten, and yet another version from Westphalia has twenty Japanesemen. .

The version featuring Japanesemen is still common in some parts of Switzerland, and a particularly inventive version recorded in Ticino not only rounds off the song with a final yodel but has the Asians sitting on the street not with, but without a double bass.. The reason for this could be that some of the oldest known variants do not even feature any musical instrument at all, but rather has them sitting on a street without a passport (German pass), which would even give the lyrics at least a trace of meaning. Whether these are in fact the original lyrics or whether they are later well-meant corrections by an anonymous hand, must remain speculation.

Furthermore, the precise type of musical instrument was not settled until around 1930. The threefold repetition of the monosyllabic Bass was gradually replaced by Kontrabass, which in fact fits much better into the metric structure of the text. Thus, the song book Der Kilometerstein in the 1934 Potsdam edition furnished by von Gustav Scholten still has the Bass, while the 1941 Mainz edition by Ludwig Voggenreiter already reads Kontrabass.

In fact, there are hardly two identical versions in the early records. While this is a characteristic of most folksongs, the fact that the Three Chinesemen are not only a song but also a game may account for many of the irregularities. Just about every single word has been changed over time. Thus, there are variants that have the Asians sitting, standing, or walking on the street, while they were chatting or singing, and at times they even did all this not on a street at all, but rather in the woods.

Only in the 1970s have the song books uniformly settled on the version cited in the introduction. The main reason for this is most certainly the standardizing effect of mass media, in this case the Schlager-inflected recording sung by the trio Medium-Terzett that hit the German charts in 1968 and was broadcast by televison and radio countless times..

Tune

The two tunes noted above have been in use virtually since the very first records. In some instances, the melody combines elements of both; for instance, the early Estonian and Pomeranian versions are closer to today's "Swiss" tune, while further west the "German" tune seems to have prevailed from the start. Most of the older versions exhibit a more complex harmonic and rhythmic structure than the extant two tunes, though; some demanded a triadic arpeggio or other more complex chords at some points, others covered wider intervals.. The gradual simplification of the melody may be due to the fact that it is after all a children's song; it may have been altered for pedagogical purposes, i.e. to suit the faculties of kindergarden-age kids. In any case, the fifth interval that rules both extant tunes is typical for text-oriented songs and thus fits the use of the song as a game.

Origin and Rules of the Game

The vowel exchange was not the original game associated with the song. A version published in Leipzig in 1913 (G. Winter, Ringel, Ringel, Rosenkranz. Leipzig 1913) entitled "Ein Japanese mit dem Bass" (One Japanese Man With A Bass) is conceived as a kind of ring-a-ring-a-roses game and does not provide any alteration of the lyrics at all. A rule from 1929 for "Ein Chinese mit dem Bass, Bass, Bass" (A Chineseman with a bass, bass, bass), says how the children stand and sing in a ring, while somebody goes around tapping a person at random, on the shoulder. The person who is tapped then has to go into the middle of the circle. Once there are enough children in the circle, they start jumping around.

In other variants the variable parameter were not the vowels but the number of musical Asians. The Pomeranian version from 1909 increases the unmer of Japanesemen by one with every stanza (Zwei Japanesen mit dem Bass ..., Drei Japanesen ... etc.), other variants counted them down from twenty or ten in the manner of Ten Little Niggers (German Zehn kleine Negerlein).

The game involving an exchange of the vowels is first recorded in the above-mentioned 1934 edition of Der Kilometerstein. Han Sen, a Chinese writer who was born in Berlin in 1925 but emigrated shortly after the "Machtergreifung" notes in his autobiography (entitled Ein Chinese mit dem Kontrabass) that he knew this rule in his childhood; it must therefore have been current before 1933 at least in Berlin. The fast increasing popularity of the game in the twenties may be explained by the taste of the age and may account for its fast increasing popularity . It was the early heydey of German Schlager. Many hits of the age owed their comic effect on wellnigh dadasist meaninglessness and simple nonsensical rhymes such as Mein Onkel Bumba aus Kalumba ("My uncle Bumba from Kalumba") or Mein Papagei frisst keine harten Eier ("My parrot won't eat hard-boiled eggs").

It is possible that the idea of vowel exchange derives from like games played by children in Romance-speaking Europe. The same vowel-excahnge rule applies to the Spanish song-game La mar estaba serena (also: salada) and, with some differences, the Italian Garibaldi fu ferito.

Children of Turkish immigrants to Germany have picked up both tune and game and adapted it to the peculiarities of the Turkish language. Unlike German, the Turkish language has a vowel harmony system, which accords much greater significance to the vowels in the process of semantic signification. Therefore, while the actual meaning of the lyrics remains discernible in German at any stage of the game, it changes significantly in Turkish. Hilarity ensues.