Canadian Journal for Traditional Music (1981)
Stereotype Forms in English-Canadian Children's Songs: Historical and Pedagogical Aspects
Scholars have studied a number of aspects of English-language children's songs. For example, Alice B. Gomme compiled variants of various songs collected in Great Britain, described the games and dances which accompany them, and pointed out parallels with other types of folklore.1 Others, such as Edith Fowke, Vance Randolph, and Brian Sutton-Smith have documented the tradition of English-language children's songs outside Britain, viz., in Canada, the United States, and New Zealand.2 In studies such as these, much attention has been paid to texts, games, dances, folkloric significance, and geographical distribution, but little to the tunes. The aim of the present study, accordingly, is to shed some light on musical aspects of the songs.
We in Canada are very fortunate for the work that has been done by Edith Fowke. She has collected and compiled a large body of children's songs (mostly from the Toronto area), and made them available in both archival and published form. In doing this, she has taken great care to have the music of the songs professionally transcribed (by Keith MacMillan), and to have both texts and music recorded on tapes that are accessible to present and future workers.3 If ever there was a body of material on which to base a preliminary study of the music of English-language children's songs in general and the English-Canadian branch of the tradition in particular, it consists of Fowke's complications. For this reason, the bulk of what follows is based on material gathered by Fowke. (Cited items from the Fowke books will be indicated by their numbers in brackets.)
General Classification of the Repertoire
From a musical point of view, the repertoire of English-Canadian children's songs can be divided roughly into three categories. One group consists of songs which are chanted to one of the following subsets of the intervals in the pentatonic scale: E,G,A (most common), D,G,A (less frequent), and D,E,G,A (quite rate). Another class of songs consists of pieces that are obvious parodies or contrafacts of songs which, originally, formed part of the adult repertoire. At various points in history, children (or camp counsellors, etc.) have taken the tunes of songs, hymns, and carols such as "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight," "John Brown's Body," and "While Shepherds Watched," and created new works for them. The third category of songs constitutes a residue of the first two groups: here the melodies consist of six or more
tones and there is no evidence of adult or adolescent origins. It is this third type of song with which the remainder of this study deals.
Stereotyped Forms
A number of stereotyped forms are evident in this third type of song, and in each of them, motivic repetition, melodic contour, textual repetition, and rhyme are coordinated with a high degree of uniformity. This leads one to suspect that at some point in the history of the songs certain models emerged which formed the basis for song composition within the musical culture of English-speaking children. Accordingly, one would like to know how far back in time these stereotyped forms can be traced. Furthermore, since they seem to have emerged and been perpetuated within children's culture, it would appear that they embody enduring structural values in that culture. Because of this, these forms might have a great deal to tell us about the musical activities of children that are led by grown-ups at home and in school. The implications of these forms for musical pedagogy are possibly quite considerable. For these reasons, I will discuss the forms in some detail, trace as far as I can their earliest documented occurrences and distribution, and consider their possible implications for musical education.
The "London Bridge" Form
As a mnemonic for the future, I have chosen to attach to each of the three stereotyped forms the title of a song which is representative of the group as a whole. In each case, I have chosen the title quite arbitrarily. At this point, I do not wish to imply that the particular song which I have chosen to represent a given group is in any way the historical prototype or model for the others. Future study might determine what the prototype of a given group was, but that is not at issue here.
The first stereotyped form to be considered can be represented by the song "London Bridge." In the text of "London Bridge" (cf. Figure 1), there is an initial line consisting of two halves: London Bridge is I falling down. The second line consists of repetitions of the second half of the first line: Falling down, I falling down. This can be diagrammed as follows: first line: a + b; second line: b + b.
The third line consists of a repetition of the first: London Bridge is
I falling down: a + b. And the last is composed of new material: My fair / lady 0: c + d. In summary, the form of the four lines can be described as follows:
first line: a+b second line: b+b third line: a+b fourth line: c+d
If one examines the tune for this song, one finds a striking correspondence between textual and musical organization. At each point where the text repeats material, the tune does too. In the first half of the second phrase (which corresponds to the second line), the repetition involves a downward transposition of the motive of the preceding half phrase. Thus the combined textual and musical form can be summarized as follows (the superscript minus sign:
"—" representing the downward transposition):
text: a+b b+b a+b c+d
tune: A+B B+B A+B C+D
This pattern of repetition is found in other English-Canadian children's songs: "Rig-a-Jig-Jig," "The White Ship Sails," and the first half of "Did You Ever See a Lassie" (Sally, 4, 34, 13). It also appears in modified form (without the pattern of descent and return among the first three B subphrases) in "The Mulberry Bush," "When I Was a Baby," "Old Roger is Dead." "Three Kings A-Riding," the second half of "On a Mountain," and "Three Craws" (Sally, 8, 14, 21, 31, 115; Ring, 85). Moreover, its use is not res cted to these ten songs, for the tunes of a number of these are sung to other texts, and in each case the textual form a + b b + b, a + b, c + d is retained. The tune of "London Bridge" is used for "The Robbers Coming Through" and "Head and Shoulders"; the melody of "Did You Ever See a Lassie" is used for "Jinny Jo," "I'm a Little Dutch Girl," and "Oh, Say, John Won't You Buy Me"; and the music of "The Mulberry Bush" is used for "Nuts in May" (Sally, 25, 43, 28, 38, 294, 27). In all, then, at least sixteen English-Canadian children's songs make use of the stereotyped form found in "London Bridge."
When one traces the distribution of songs in this group, a number of patterns emerge. For several of the songs found in Canada, one finds the same text joined to the same tune in Great Britain. This is the case for "London Bridge," "The Mulberry Bush," "When I Was a Baby," "Old Roger is Dead," "The Robbers Coming Through," and "Nuts in May."4 Quite often in Britain a given text found in Canada is matched not with the tune used in Canada but with another tune of the London Bridge group. The texts of "London Bridge" and "Three Kings A-Riding" are sometimes sung in Britain to the tune of "The Mulberry Bush," the words of "Jinny-Jo" appear with the melody of "Old Roger is Dead," and "When I Was a Baby" is matched to the music of "Did You Ever See a Lassie."5 Often, too, a text from the London
Bridge group is connected in Britain with a tune that has the London Bridge form but which does not appear to be sung in Canada. This is the case with some variants of London Bridge: "The White Ship Sails," "Old Roger is Dead," "Three Kings A-Riding," and "When I Was a Baby."6 In only a few cases, texts belonging to this group are found in Britain with a form different from that represented by the London Bridge type. This happens with variants of "London Bridge," itself, as well as "Old Roger is Dead" and "Jinny-Jo."7
In a few cases, I have not been able to trace the songs, as they appear in Canada, to Britain. The text of "Did You Ever See a Lassie," though its tune appears in Britain (see above), has not been recorded there, but rather in the United States.8 "Rig-A-Jig Jig" has also been recorded in the U.S. — albeit without its tune, but with a closely related textual form.9 And a variant of the text of "Head and Shoulders" appears in New York City with a greatly different textual form and a melody that belongs to the chant type described above.'0 Other songs have not been traced so far, and consequently must be assigned a less well-defined — possibly North American or even Canadian — background. This seems to be the case with "Head and Shoulders" and the second half of "On a Mountain."
In sum, then, it would appear that the London Bridge type was well established in Great Britain. There, individual texts of the type were married to their tunes with variable degrees of fidelity. Sometimes tunes of the type were switched with one another and in a few cases the songs took on quite different forms. The type as a whole persisted on migration to North America, where possibly some new texts and tunes were composed to the established, stereotyped formula.
If one tries to establish a chronology for this song-type, a number of problems arise. First, there is a dearth of dated sources directly relevant to the songs. Gomme has reported an account of a text for "London Bridge" that supposedly dates from the seventeenth century, but this is a variant of the text that is cast in a form greatly different from what we are concerned with here.1' Beyond this, students of the song's history can only speculate on the antiquity of the ritual symbolism seemingly implied by the texts.'2
With regard to chronology, a slight cue is provided by a unifying aspect of the tunes which has not been dealt with so far: the tunes' adherence to a fairly rigid implied harmonic scheme. This touches on a very sensitive issue in musical folklore research, namely, whether one can validly posit an implied harmonization for a tune in a monophonic tradition. In this case, I think one can, and the justification for proceeding this way lies in the regularity of the results that obtain. The tune of "London Bridge," to judge from its pattern of leaps and metrically accented tones, seems to imply the following chords (aligned with the formal symbols used above):
a+b b+b a+b c+d
A+B W+B A+B C+D
I I V(7)I I I V(7)I
The same pattern of chords (I I V(7) I / I I V(7)I) seems implied by "Rig-A-Jig Jig," "The White Ship Sails," the first half of "Did You Ever See a Lassie," "When I Was a Baby," "Three Craws," and "On a Mountain" (though the latter might be harmonized as follows: I I ii I/I I V(7)I). A closely related pattern: I I V . / I I V I is found in the tunes of "The Mulberry Bush," "Old Roger is Dead," and "Three Kings A-Riding." These apparent harmonic patterns would seem to have two points of significance. First, they would appear to indicate that the tune-type originated during or after the rise of the tonic-dominant polarity in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. True, the emergence of this polarity has been best documented for art music, but one can discern a similar shift from modal or "pre-tonal" style to a tonic-dominant dialectic in popular English music of the time as represented, for example, by the Playford publications. Secondly, the similarities in harmonic patterns could well account for the phenomenon whereby one tune of the group or type is switched for another. Given such a high degree of similarity among the tunes, one would not be surprised if one tune were confused or substituted for another as appears to have been the case.
Also noteworthy are appearances of the stereotyped London Bridge form in adjacent and seemingly overlapping repertoires. For example, in the United States, songs having the London Bridge form including "The Old Gray Mare," "Buffalo Gals," and "Old Ponto is Dead" were found among black children more than fifty years ago.'3 It is not too surprising then that spirituals such as "Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho" and "Zion's Children" have this form too.'4 The London Bridge form has also appeared in the repertoires of nursery and camp songs, neither of which are, strictly speaking, children's songs. For instance, "Mary Had a Little Lamb," with words written in 1830 by Mrs. Sarah J. Hale,'5 has continued to be sung to children by their elders and has been parodied by older children in forms such as "Mary Had A William Goat."6 The appearance of the form in "I Saw Three Ships" indicates some overlap with the repertoire of English folk carols.'7 Finally, it should be noted that "The Mulberry Bush" is reported to have appeared in a New York City publication in 1798.18
In summary, then, it seems that the London Bridge form arose sometime in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. It spread from Britain to North America, manifesting along the way a certain infidelity or promiscuity in the relationships between its texts and tunes. In North America it took on renewed life in the form of what are probably new tunes and texts following the model, spread to the
black community, and might have served as a basis for some spirituals. During its history, the form was used as a pattern for a very famous nursery song and probably a folk carol too, and tunes belonging to its type have been used as settings for other words both within and outside the English-language children's song tradition.
"Go In and Out the Window" represents a second group of songs sharing a single stereotyped melo-textual form. In this case, the form can be symbolized by the following formula (cf. Fig. 2):
text: a+a a+b
music: A+A A+B
The descent in the second phrase (A—) is typically not a literal transposition of the first A but rather a depression of the phrase's second half. The form as diagrammed above is found not only in "Go In and Out the Window" but also in "Round the Mountain," the first half of "Looby Loo" where the second a is modified to rhyme with b of the fourth line, "Bluebird, Bluebird," "No Bears Out Tonight," "Patsy On the Railroad," and "Johnny's So Long At the Fair" (Sally, 10, 11, 16, 39; Ring, 151, 186). In the second half of "Bingo," the third A is even lower than the second (Sally, 163). The third phrase appears somewhat modified in comparison with the first phrase, namely, by a rise in its second half, in "Going to Boston," "The Pig In the Parlour," and "I Love Little Willie" (Sally, 36, 23, 300). The latter two cases involve a tune used by adults: "The Pig In the Parlour" has the same tune as "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" (or "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" or "Malbrough S'En Va-t'en Guerre"); the tune of "I Love Little Willie" is the same as that for "The Campbells Are Coming." The underlying harmonies for this group of songs appear to be reducible to successions of I, IV, and
On tracing the distribution of the eleven songs mentioned, one finds that "Bingo" and "Looby Loo" appear with the same texts and tunes in England.'9 "Go In and Out the Window" has the same text in English but not the same tune. The melody found in the Canadian version appears in the U.S. with the same text, and the same is true of "Bluebird, Bluebird" and "Patsy On the Railroad."2° For other songs of the group, neither the text nor the tune
used in Canada appears to have existed in England, but the text (at least) is found in the U.S. This is true of "No Bears Out Tonight" and "Going to Boston."2' Other songs of this type are found in Scotland and Ireland.22 They are also abundant in the U.S.,23 and in the U.S., songs of this type have been found among black children.24 As was the case with the London Bridge type, one encounters spirituals such as "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" cast in the form of "Go In and Out the Window."25 Related to this phenomenon might be the case of the U.S. camp meeting song "Say Brothers Will You Meet Us" which was parodied as "John Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" from which numerous further parodies have developed.26
In sum, though the type might have originated in England with examples such as "Looby Loo" and "Bingo" (and "Polly Put the Kettle On")27 much of its development seems to have taken place in Ireland, Scotland, and North America, where it entered black culture and might have served as the basis for spirituals and parodies sung by older people. Any dates that can be found for individual songs and parodies of this type point to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.28
The last form to be dealt with here can be represented by "The Farmer in the Dell," which has the following form (cf. Fig. 3):
text: a+a b+a
music: A+A+ B+D
This scheme is found not only in "The Farmer in the Dell" but also in "Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow," "If you're Happy and You Know It," and the second half of "New River Train." In "Who Stole My Chickens and My Hens," the same scheme appears with the single difference that the second A is transposed downward rather than upward (Sally, 6, 41; Ring, 187; Sally, 164). Beyond these five songs, one should note that the tune of "The Farmer in the Dell" is used with the texts of "I With I Wath a Fith" and "AHunting We Will Go" (with the last a of the text replaced by a c) (Sally, 291, 32). It also appears as the melody for "Sally Go Round the Sun," "The Grand Old Duke of York," "Somebody's Under the Bed," and "A Sailor Went to Sea" where the textual form is A + B C + D in each case (Sally, 1, 33, 79, 146). This brings the total of English-Canadian children's songs belonging to the stereotyped pattern to at least eleven. In each instance the implied harmonies are I, IV, and V(7).
As one traces the distribution of this form, one finds some interesting patterns. "The Farmer in the Dell" appears with much the same text and tune (in this case rendered as AABC) in Britain.29 The texts of some songs sung to the Farmer in the Dell tune used in Canada are found in Britain but not necessarily sung to the same tune.30 "Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow" is sung in Britain to much more complex tunes. In one version, a couple of verses have the AA + BC form. The only other use of this form in Britain appears to be for "What Are Little Boys Made Of."3'
In the United States, "The Farmer in the Dell" and "Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley Grow" are sung to the same tune as in Canada,32 and other songs such as Woody Guthrie's "Put Your Finger In the Air" (copyright 1954), "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain," and the song "Happy Birthday To You" (copyright/ 1935) have used a similar form as well.33 In short, though it might have originated in Britain with songs such as "The Farmer in the Dell" and "Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow," the stereotyped form seems to have taken firmer hold in the U.S. and Canada where new texts and tunes have continued to be created according to the mold. Nothing of what is known about the form's distribution and chronology suggests an origin any earlier than the nineteenth century.
Pedagogical Implications
There is currently some interest on the part of educators in using Canadian folk music in the schools. For example, Alice Lingard has recently reported on the Kodály program being developed in Middlesex County, Ontario.34 She writes: "Why Kodály? Because (in) the Kodály approach. . . all skill development comes from the child's repertoire; of particular interest to members of the Canadian Folk Music Society, (the Kodály approach) establishes its roots in the native folk song. The early repertoire consists of children's songs and games and . . . Canadian folk song of the region, followed by Canadian folk songs from across the country." Further on she reports that "a special grant has been obtained . . . to commission two-part arrangements of Canadian folk songs for the Middlesex Board of Education. . . . They will be selected for their appeal and skill development in the junior grades. . . . This song material will be the Canadian parallel to the Hungarian Bicinia."
From the preceding discussion of song types in the EnglishCanadian children's repertoire, it should be clear that a large portion of the non-chant songs which have probably been composed by children and definitely perpetuated by Canadian children is English or possibly American in origin. Generally such songs are Canadian only in the sense that Canadian children now sing them, though a few might even be Canadian in origin. Despite certain overlaps with the repertoire of adults, these songs are for the most part children's pieces in the narrow sense of probably having been created and transmitted largely within the culture of the child. Many of the songs in their present form seem to have stood a test of time, although the period involved might amount to only a century or two at the most. Little is known of geographical differences in the distribution of these songs — or ones like them — throughout Canada, but a number, to judge from their international dispersion, are probably well-known by English-speaking children throughout the country. One can only hope that, in the tradition of Kodály himself, applications of his approach will be based on a thorough foundation of ethnomusicological research.
From the pedagogical point of view, it seems desirable to progress along the venerable route from "known to unknown." In the program described above, students move from the "known" of children's song in the primary grades (1 to 3, approximately ages 6 to 9, i.e., when these songs are sung indigenously) to the "unknown" of two-part arrangements to the junior grades (4 to 6, approximately ages 9 to 12, i.e., when the repertoire considered here is beginning to wane in indigenous use). One can envision an intermediate step in which: a) contrafacts of known songs are introduced, providing new words and rhythms to familiar songs, and b) entirely new songs following the stereotyped forms described above are composed and taught. Both portions of such an intermediate step are thoroughly "traditional" in that children (including possibly Canadian children) have engaged in them over the years. Indeed, the writing and teaching of contrafacts and newly composed songs having the stereotyped forms described above have already been carried out by one of my students in Independent Studies at York University's Atkinson College. How fruitful this approach might be remains to be seen. One should note, all the same, that it seems most desirable to compose such new material in a prosidic, rhythmic, and tonal style consistent with what is known of the children's repertoire. A full exposition of this style must await, however, the publication of another article.
Final Considerations
One should carefully observe that the general statements on the history and distribution of songs belonging to the types described above are quite tentative. Bibliographic resources for the study of English-language children's songs remain difficult of access and in any case cannot represent a total picture of the repertoire and its evolution over the years. Nevertheless, some final generalizations seem worth advancing at this point. First, though there appears to be a tendency towards a certain contour (through transposition up or down of a previous motif) within a given type, it is not universal:
what appears to remain throughout a given stereotyped form is a pattern of repetition with or without characteristic transposition. Secondly, with a few exceptions such as "Looby Loo," rhyme per se appears to have no place in these stereotyped forms. The rhymes that one observes generally involve the repetition of an entire line or half-line of poetry rather than a mere syllable. This distinguishes these songs from the bulk of the remaining pieces in English-language tradition: these remaining songs are far less repetitive and use rhyme in the narrow sense of syllable repetition to link one line to another. Finally, it seems clear that the melodies have much to tell us about children's songs. One hopes that future studies will pursue the musical findings developed here.
York University
Downsview, Ontario
Footnotes
1 Alice B. Gomme, The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2 vols. (London: David Nutt, 1894-98; rpt. New York: Dover, 1964).
2 Edith Fowke, Sally Go Round the Sun (Toronto: McCtetland and Stewurt, t969); Vance Randolph and Floyd C. Shoemaker, Ozark Folksongs, 4 vots. (Columbia: The State Historical Society of Missouri, 1946-50); Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ga,nes of New Zealand Children (Berkeley: University of Culiforain Press, 1959).
3 Cf. Fowke, op. cit., which contains 300 song texts with 78 notations of melodies and iadications of she tunes to which 25 parodies or contrafacts are snag. The remaining songs are largely simple chants of the type described below. Cf. also the Edith Fowke Collection, Listening Room, Scott Library, York University, Tapes 81 to 85, which contain therecordings on which Sally Go Round the Sun is based. Cf. as well, Edith Fowke, Ring Around the Moon (Toronto: McClelland and Stesrart, 1977), which contains songs of English-Canadian children a little older than the five to eleven age range represented by Sally.
4 Gomme, I, 333, 404; 11362, 16; I, 192; II, 424.
5 Gomme, 1,333; It, 233; 1,260; II, 362.
6 Gomme, passim.
7 Gomme, passim.
8 Leah Rachel Clara Yoffie, "Three Generations of Children's Singing Games in St. Louis," Journal of American Folklore, 60(1947), 1-51, and Marie Winn, The Fireside Book of Children's Songs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966, 162).
9 The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore (Durham: Duke University Press, 1952), I, 128.
10 Tony Schwartz, One, Two, Three a,tda Zing, Zing, Sing, New York, Folkways Records, 1953, FC 7003.
11 Gomme, 1,348.
12 Ibid., passim.
13 Dorothy Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (Cambridge, MA Harvard Univ. Press, 1925; rpt. Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1963), 13, 113.
14 Cf. Scarborough, 114, and Leslie Woodgate, The Puffin Song Book (London: Penguin, 1956), 154.
15 lona and Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 300.
16 Fowke, Ring, No.71, cf. also the U.S. references, loc. cit.
17 Woodgate, 22.
18 Tom Glazer, Toot Glazer's Treasury of Songs for Children (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 164.
19 Gomme, 1,29,352.
20 William W. Newell, Games- and Songs of American Children (New York: Harper, 1903; rpt. New York: Dover, 1963), 128; Winn, 174; Glazer, 186.
21 Frank C. Brown Collection, I, 81; BA. Botkin, The American Play-Party Song (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1937; rpt. 19631.
22 Cf. ''Where Are You Going, My Bonny Wee Lass,'' in Ewan MacColt and Dominic Behan, Tire Singing Streets, Fotkways FW 3562, 1958, A-2; Eilis Brady, Alt In! All Itt! (Dublin: Baile Átha Cliath, 1975), 120, 112.
23 CF. tire second part of ''All Up and Down My Honey,'' Botkin, 810; the refrain of ''Old Joe Clark,'' ibid., 814; and ''Skip to My Lou,'' Winn, 178.
24 Cf. "Aurorc Praclere," tire chorus of "Norah," "Jack O'Diamonds," arid "I'm a Nachel-Bawn Reacher," Scarborough, 121, 222, 279, 233.
25 Woodgate, 74.
26 Cf. Glazer, 28.
27 Woodgate, 34
28 Glazer, 28, 172 190.
29 Brady, tOt; Alison McMorland, Tire fltnny Family (London: Ward Lock Educational, 1978), 49.
30 E.G., Gomme, 1,243; II, 149.
31 Woodgate, 100.
32 Winn tOO, lot.
33 Woody Gnthrie, Tire Woody Guthrie Folk Song Folio; Songs to Grotv O,t (New York: Folkways Music Publishers, 1954), cited in Wina, 164; Fowkc, Ring, Ill and references to U.S. sources
34 Alice Lingard ''Special Kodhly Report,'' Ca,radian Folk Music Society Bulletin, Summer, 1981, p.7.
Résumé: En analysant les airs propres aux chants traditionnels des enfants au Canada, Jay Rahn constate qu 'il y a trois formes stéréotypées qui renferment un nombre considerable d'items différents. Il les classe sous trois formes: celle de "London Bridge", celle de "Go, In and Out the Window" et celle de "Farmer in the Dell". Il souligne l'histoire, la repartition de chacun et démontre que les motifs, les textes, les contours mélodiques et la rime sont coordonnés dens chaque groupe. Ce qu'il a trouvé, prouve que l'étude des chants traditionnels des enfants peut être d'une grande valeur pour leprofesseur de musique.
© Canadian Journal for Traditional Music