Mary Had A Little Lamb: A Song History

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The verses began as "Mary's Lamb," a poem by the writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale. It appeared in 1830 both in her collection Poems for Our Children and in the September and October number of The Juvenile Miscellany, a Boston magazine for children, where it is signed "S.J.H."[1][2][3] Sources differ on which printing came first: the Morgan Library and Lehigh University give the magazine priority, while the volunteer archivist of the Sarah J. Hale Collection at the Richards Free Library in Newport, New Hampshire, puts the book first.[2][3][4][5] Hale later edited the Miscellany herself.[1][3]

Winslow Homer painting of barefoot boys playing snap the whip in a field in front of a red country schoolhouse

Winslow Homer, Snap the Whip, oil on canvas, 1872. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its country schoolhouse; it has no connection to the poem.

The first musical setting came from Lowell Mason, the pioneer of music teaching in American schools, who asked to set the poem and published it in 1831 in Juvenile Lyre, a songbook intended for school use.[6] In the sources consulted here, the origin of the tune most children now sing to the words is not firmly documented, so it is not traced on this page. A rival story surfaced in 1876, when Mary Sawyer of Sterling, Massachusetts, by then about seventy, said that a lamb had followed her to school around 1815 and that a boy named John Roulstone had handed her verses about it the next day. No copy of those verses survives, and Roulstone died in 1822. Henry Ford later took up the claim, building a schoolhouse at his Wayside Inn in Sudbury that incorporated salvaged pieces of the old one, which had long served as a barn, and publishing a 1928 book on the story. Smithsonian Libraries treats Hale's authorship as generally accepted, and the Hale archivist, in a comment there, argues that nothing ties Sawyer's account to Hale's poem.[4][5]

The rhyme also has a place in the history of sound. The Library of Congress recounts that Edison, experimenting with a stylus on a tinfoil cylinder, was astonished to hear his device give back this nursery rhyme, which he had spoken into it. Edison did not file his patent application until December 24, 1877, so the Library doubts the familiar date of August 12, 1877, for the finished model and places its completion in November or December of that year.[7]

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Sources

  1. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Sarah Josepha Hale".
  2. The Morgan Library & Museum: "The Juvenile Miscellany" (PML 87179).
  3. Lehigh University Libraries: "Mary's Lamb".
  4. Smithsonian Libraries, Unbound: "Mary Had A Little Lamb".
  5. New England Historical Society: "Mary Had a Little Lamb - Yes, There Was a Mary and She Did Have a Little Lamb".
  6. Forgotten Chapters of Boston's Literary History (Boston College): "Lowell Mason, 'Mary's Lamb' music, Juvenile Lyre".
  7. Library of Congress, Today in History: "Mr. Edison's Phonograph" (August 12).