Little Bo Peep

[owlfish]

Poll

Last week in guitar class, it was news to me that "Little Bo Peep" had any tune at all. The other students were mildly astonished; they'd never known it without one.

Comments

[desperance]

My mother used to sing it to me, and I could reproduce it at need - but it's still a nursery rhyme first, for all that it comes with a tune. It ain't a song. There is apparently a clear difference in my head.

[owlfish]

I only learned last week it had any tune at all. It made learning guitar chords to go along with the tune extra-challenging, when I didn't know the tune it was going along with.

Interesting about the tune vs song distinction, even with words. Hmm.

[desperance]

Thinking on it further - damn you for your questioning ways! - it occurs to me that there was at least conversation if not controversy when I was a kid, about whether it was "dragging" or "wagging". I'm fairly sure that "dragging" was the ur-text, at least for me; "wagging" may have come with the song. Or it may have made better sense to us, because lambs certainly do wag their tails, while no sheep of my acquaintance had anything big enough to drag (the notion of fat-tailed sheep was utterly unknown to us, an undiscovered country etc). Even so, I do now and I think I would then have stood by "dragging" as the proper version.

[houseboatonstyx]

Me too, from Texas but in a house full of English children's lit books.

[deborah_c]

"Bringing their tails", I think. It's been a while...

[lil_shepherd]

Now I think about it, I've heard that version too. Just not 'wagging'.

[sollersuk]

I went totally blank on it at first, but yes, "bringing".

[pennski]

Another vote for "bringing".

[lil_shepherd]

To be more precise, "I've never heard the tune." Most nursery rhymes have been set to music at various points in the past. I've just not heard this one.

[sollersuk]

In the cases that I know about, the tune came first and the words were put to it. A very large proportion come from the 18th century and are a good window into 18th century popular music

[gillo]

That was my gut feeling too - Ride a cock horse is pretty much Lilibulero, after all. And some nursery rhymes started out as satire - The Grand Old Duke of York, for example.

[sollersuk]

Apparently none of them started off as being for children; they were just songs that people knew that they sang to children, and this developed into a tradition even when the contemporary allusions were forgotten

[tisiphone]

It's not exactly a tune to my ears, more of a singsongy rhythm.

[bookzombie]

While I'm pretty sure it was 'wagging their tails...' in the version I learned, as a tiny I found it very confusing. I assumed the 'behind them' meant that the tails were no longer attached and were being dragged in a bag (or something.)

I guess as a very literal-minded child I was confused by the implication that the tails were something separate and not actually an integral part of them!