Old McDonald: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"Old MacDonald" is the best-known member of a large and loose family of cumulative farmyard songs, in which each verse adds another animal and its call; the Traditional Ballad Index groups them together while warning that the British and American branches can look very different from each other.[1] The earliest dated text the Index lists comes from 1917, in F. T. Nettleingham's Tommy's Tunes, a London collection of soldiers' songs gathered on active service with the British Expeditionary Force in the First World War, where the song is called "Ohio"; the Index also cites Fuld's view that the familiar form surfaced only in 1917, and then still under the name Old MacDougal.[1][2] American collectors found relatives too. Randolph's collection has two, "The Merry Green Fields of the Lowland" and "Old Missouri," neither matching the familiar form, and the Frank C. Brown North Carolina folklore volumes print a "McDonald's Farm."[1]

Charles Jacque painting of sheep and chickens in a dim barn with a shepherd tending the flock

Charles Jacque, The Sheepfold, oil on wood, 1857. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its farm animals; it has no connection to the song.

Claims of an older ancestry are harder to pin down. The Index treats the family as one song partly because a closely similar piling-up pattern already turns up in Pills to Purge Melancholy.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive, discussing D'Urfey's "In the Fields in Frost and Snow," sung in the ballad opera The Kingdom of the Birds (first staged in 1706), reports that the song is said to be a forerunner of "Old MacDonald," while noting that the melodies differ and the likeness lies in the rhythm of the chorus and the words.[3] In the sources consulted here, that link remains a family resemblance rather than a documented line of descent.

The song reached records in the mid-1920s. A male vocal trio billed as the Sam Patterson Trio recorded "Old MacDonald had a farm" for Edison on September 18, 1925, the earliest recording in the Index's list, and the Index also lists versions by Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers on Columbia (1927) and by Warren Caplinger's Cumberland Mountain Entertainers on Brunswick (1928).[1][4] The Index files it among camp songs and cites it from sociability and camp songbooks, and it is now known above all as a children's song, the Tune Archive calling it a "favorite and familiar" one.[1][3]

Find books with Old McDonald for sale →

Sources

  1. Traditional Ballad Index: "Old MacDonald Had a Farm".
  2. HathiTrust Digital Library: "Tommy's tunes" (F. T. Nettleingham, London: E. Macdonald, 1917).
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "In the Fields in Frost and Snow".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings (UC Santa Barbara): "Sam Patterson Trio".