Lady Lil and Pisspot Pete

ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR FOLK POEMS in the United States Lady Lil. Its central motif in Frank Hoffmann's Analytical Survey ofAnglo-American Traditional Erotica (1973) X735.9.2.2, Lie: Celebrated whore who claims to be able to take on any man meets her match. In The Horn Book, G. Legman says that this erotic narrative poem is now being collected as hardly more than a four-line toast or epitaph (1964:417), but Lady Lil still can be collected in fairly full texts in the American oral tradition from Maine to Washington. In spite of the popularity of this poem in American folklore over the last 50 years, though, Lady Lil, like most traditional erotica, has received scant attention from folklorists

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