Children's Songs - Nursery or Mother Goose Rhymes

Nursery or Mother Goose Rhymes

The term nursery rhyme is used for ‘traditional’ songs for young children in Britain and many English speaking countries, but usage only dates from the nineteenth century and in North America the older ‘Mother Goose Rhymes’ is still often used. The oldest children's songs of which we have records are lullabies, which can be found in every human culture. The Roman nurses' lullaby, 'Lalla, Lalla, Lalla, aut dormi, aut lacte', may be the oldest to survive. Many medieval English verses associated with the birth of Jesus take the form of a lullaby, including "Lullay, my liking, my dere son, my sweting" and may be versions of contemporary lullabies.

However, most of those used today date from the seventeenth century onwards. We know that some rhymes were medieval or sixteenth century in origin, including 'To market, to market' and 'Cock a doodle doo', but most were not written down until the eighteenth century, when the publishing of children's books began to move towards entertainment. The first English collections were Tommy Thumb's Song Book and a sequel, Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, both thought to have been published before 1744, and at this point such songs were known as 'Tommy Thumb's songs'. The publication of John Newbery's Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle (c.1785), is the first record we have of many classic rhymes, still in use today. These rhymes seem to have come from a variety of sources, including traditional riddles, proverbs, ballads, lines of Mummers' plays, drinking songs, historical events, and, it has been suggested, ancient pagan rituals. Roughly half of the current body of recognised 'traditional' English rhymes were known by the mid-eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth century printed collections of rhymes began to spread to other countries, including Robert Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826) and in the United States, Mother Goose's Melodies (1833). From this period we sometimes know the origins and authors of rhymes, like 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star', which combined an eighteenth-century French tune with a poem by English writer Jane Taylor and 'Mary Had a Little Lamb', written by Sarah Josepha Hale of Boston in 1830. Early folk song collectors also often collected nursery rhymes, including in Scotland Sir Walter Scott and in Germany Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806–8). The first, and possibly the most important academic collection to focus in this area was James Orchard Halliwell's, The Nursery Rhymes of England (1842) and Popular Rhymes and Tales in 1849. By the time of Sabine Baring-Gould's A Book of Nursery Songs (1895), child folklore was an academic study, full of comments and foot-notes. The early years of the twentieth century are notable for the illustrations to children's books including Caldecott's Hey Diddle Diddle Picture Book (1909) and Arthur Rackham's Mother Goose (1913). The definitive study of English rhymes remains the work of Iona and Peter Opie.