Jack and Jill (nursery rhyme) and brown paper were a home cure used as a method to draw out bruises on the body. Jack is the most common name used in English-language nursery rhymes and represented an archetypal Everyman hero by the 18th century, while Jill or Gill had come to mean a young girl or a sweetheart by the end of the Middle Ages. However, the woodcut that accompanied the first recorded version of the rhyme showed two boys (not a boy and a girl) and used the spelling Gill not Jill. The true origin of the rhyme is unknown, but there are several
Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes mentioned that "Machine Gun Blues" would be the album's first single and available for download via iTunes on November 16. Critical reviews of "Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes" were mostly positive. AllMusic's Mark Deming gave the album a rating of three-and-a-half stars out of five and states that it "is clearly the work of a band that still gives a damn about their rock & roll, no matter how familiar the surroundings. While 2004's "Sex, Love and Rock 'N' Roll" saw Ness digging deeper into personal concerns, Hard Times finds him stepping back a few paces; while 'Can't Take It