Aunt Rhody: A Song History
"Go Tell Aunt Rhody" is a simple song with an unexpectedly grand family tree. In the words, someone is sent to tell Aunt Rhody that her old gray goose has died, the goose she had been saving to make a feather bed. Singers have also used other names for the aunt, among them Nancy, Patsy and Betsey.[1] Folklorists have found it across Appalachia, the South, the Midwest and the Northeast, and even in Ireland. A version appeared in the Journal of American Folklore in 1913, and Cecil Sharp collected it in 1918.[1] It has Roud number 3346.[1][2]
Alfred Sisley, The River Bank or Geese, lithograph, 1897. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The tune is older, and it comes from an unlikely place. Scholars trace it to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1752 opera Le devin du village (The Village Soothsayer). There it is a wordless gavotte in the pantomime, danced by a village girl.[1][3] Rousseau's version is longer and more elaborate than the folk tune.[1] A detailed study is Murl Sickbert's essay "Go Tell Aunt Rhody She's Rousseau's Dream." It follows the melody from the opera through English parlor songs of the late 1780s, such as "Sweet Melissa." It then reaches the pianist J. B. Cramer's variations, called "Rousseau's Dream," from the early 1800s. Finally it appears in American hymnals, where it was known as "Greenville" or "Rousseau."[3][4] The name "Rousseau's Dream" seems to come from a mix-up with a different Rousseau melody. That one was said to have come to him while he was delirious.[1] Under the name "Greenville," the tune has appeared in hundreds of hymnals, credited to Rousseau.[5]
In the twentieth century the song was a folk-revival favorite. Edna and Jean Ritchie of Kentucky recorded it on the 1958 Folkways album The Ritchie Family of Kentucky, and Pete Seeger sang it in concert.[2] Many young violinists learn it in Book 1 of the Suzuki method, in a longer form that follows Cramer's "Rousseau's Dream."[4] That makes it a children's tune that started life as a dance in a French opera.
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