In his The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children (1888), the American collector of folklore, Henry Carrington Bolton (1843–1903), quoted an old lady who remembered a longer version of this rhyme as being used in Wrentham, Massachusetts as early as 1780. Beyond the first four lines, it proceeded:
Nine, ten, kill a fat hen;
Eleven, twelve, bake it well;
Thirteen, fourteen, go a-courtin;
Fifteen, sixteen, go to milkin’;
Seventeen, eighteen, do the bakin’;
Nineteen, twenty, the mill is empty;
Twenty-one, change the gun;
Twenty-two, the partridge flew;
Twenty-three, she lit on a tree;
Twenty-four, she lit down lower….
Twenty-nine, the game is mine;
Thirty, make a kerchy.
Some of the final lines Bolton's informant could no longer remember.[3]
In the UK the rhyme was first recorded in Songs for the Nursery, published in London in 1805. This version differed beyond the number twelve, with the lyrics:
Since April 2023, a parodied version of the song was popularized as an internet meme.[5][6][7]
Illustrated publications
An 1869 endpaper by Walter Crane
The rhyme was sometimes published alone in illustrated editions. That with lithographs by Caroline R. Baillie (Edinburgh, 1857) had an oblong format[8] showing domestic 18th-century interiors.[9] There were also two editions of the rhyme published from London, both illustrated by Walter Crane. The first was a single volume picture-book (John Lane, 1869) with end-papers showing a composite of the 1 – 10 sequence and of the 11 – 20 sequence. It was followed in 1910 by The Buckle My Shoe Picture Book, containing other rhymes too. This had coloured full-page illustrations: composites for lines 1-2 and 3–4, and then one for each individual line.[10]
In America the rhyme was used to help young people learn to count and was also individually published. Among these, the distinctive illustrations by Courtland Hoppin (1834-1876) devoted to each verse first appeared in editions published at the end of 1866.[11] In Old Mother Goose's Rhymes And Tales (London and New York, 1889) there was only a single page given to the rhyme,[12] illustrated by Constance Haslewood in the style of Kate Greenaway.[13]
Notes
^ abcI. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pp. 333-4.