How We Know It Today:

Jimmy crack corn and I don't care, Jimmy crack corn and I don't care, Jimmy crack corn and I don't care, My master's gone away.

We're guessing the whole "master's gone away" line is probably going to be the source of the trouble here. Although admittedly, that's apropos of nothing: We have no idea who Jimmy is, or why everybody is so indifferent to his zealous corn-fracturing.

What It Actually Means:

Some dude fell off a horse and died; let's get hammered!

Called "Blue-Tail Fly" when it was first written in the 1840s, the original lyrics weren't "Jimmy crack corn," but rather "Jim crack corn" (that's not just us standing on formality; we'll use that info in a second). If you actually read through the full song lyrics, it tells the story of an unhappy slave whose job is to follow around his horseback-riding master and shoo away the flies. However, a "blue-tail fly" bites the horse, causing it to buck, and the master to be thrown and killed. An investigation follows, for which the slave avoids being blamed for the death (well, that's a weird thing to cut: Why didn't the captured servant's murder investigation make it into the children's recital?).

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And how many times did that blue-tail fly kill again?

Now, remember what we said about the refrain, that it used to be "Jim crack corn"? A quick search of Ye Olde English Dictionary finds that "Jim crack" or "gimcrack" used to mean "cheap," and "corn" was shorthand for corn whiskey. In other words, what at first sounds like a lament from a strangely loyal slave suddenly reads like the man is kickin' back and enjoying some cheap booze after his jerk master's "accident." It makes way more sense this way: Nobody would mourn the death of a corn-loving slave driver, but of course an oppressed slave would celebrate his temporary freedom with a cheap bottle of rotgut. We're not saying the song is bad or anything; rejoicing at the death of evil isn't necessarily evil itself. Still, it means your children are singing a song about gettin' fucked up on Everclear to commemorate that time a guy got his brains bashed in.