My research into the song’s background reveals the title of the song originally featured in the game of the same name, thought to have originated in Jamaica.
Boys and girls play ring games in many parts of the world, especially during their pre-teen years. In ‘There's a Brown Girl in the Ring’, an anthology of Eastern Caribbean song games by Alan Lomax, J.D. Elder and Bess Lomax Hawes, it is suggested that ring games are a children's precursor to adult courtship. Players form a ring by holding hands, then one girl or boy goes into the middle of the ring and starts skipping or walking around to the beat of the song being sung before breaking out into dance. The girl or boy is then asked, ‘Show me your motion’. At this point the child or young person in the centre has their ‘John Travolta moment of dancing exhibitionism’ and displays their finest dance movements.
Sometimes, instead of being asked, ‘Show me your motion’ the person in the circle is asked, ‘Show me your partner’, upon which being asked in their game equivalent to the British game of ‘Truth or Dare’, he or she picks a friend to join him or her in the circle. It has been played for many centuries in all of Jamaica. ‘She looks like a sugar in a plum’ is also said to be the Jamaican understanding/phrase of ‘Looking beautiful and delicious.’ Just as the British have their tradition of finding the sixpenny piece in the plum pudding, so the Jamaican children and young persons might view ‘The Ring’ to be the place where they might find their 'treasure' in the form of the person they might one day love and marry.
Thus, ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’ is primarily about Jamaican tradition and was sung by a Caribbean group. The song reportedly forms part of a West Indian child’s rites of passage and fond memories, and no racial overtones are implied in any shape and form by me in singing it to you today and acquainting you with a wonderful custom of the past that our Jamaican brothers and sisters enjoyed.
Love and peace. Bill xxx