The Itsy Bitsy Spider: A Song History
"The Itsy Bitsy Spider" is a nursery rhyme and fingerplay about a small spider that climbs a waterspout, is flushed out by the rain, and starts up again once the sun has dried things off.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index, which files it as Roud 11586 under the title "The Eensy Weensy Spider," regards it as a folk game, a status that would account for the many ways its opening words get spelled.[1] The Index also cites the Baring-Goulds' Mother Goose collection, which names the spider "Incey wincey" and says its adventures are to be acted out with the fingers.[1] No author has ever been identified, and in Britain and Australia the rhyme is usually known as "Incy Wincy Spider."[2]
Tani Bunchō, Spiders with Commentary, Design Eight from Shazanrō Picture Book, woodblock-printed book; ink and color on paper, 1816. Spiders and a web in a Japanese picture book of 1816, shown for the rhyme's subject; the print has no connection to the rhyme.
The earliest printed version that Mental Floss could find is in Arthur Walbridge North's 1910 travel book Camp and Camino in Lower California.[2] North describes writing out the words for Lettie and Lollie, the youngest members of a pioneer family at the Socorro mining camp in Baja California, after first obliging them with the animal-fair song and its monkey refrain, and he calls the piece "that classic, the 'Spider Song.'"[3] Salted with swearing, his wording was more grown-up than the rhyme children learn today.[2] For dulcimer players, Mike Anderson, drawing on decades of teaching kindergarten, arranges it in DAD tuning in Songs For Kids, a Fingers Of Steel collection of easy arrangements of songs young people enjoy, meant to be learned and then passed on to children and grandchildren.[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Eensy Weensy Spider".
- Mental Floss: "Itsy Bitsy Spider: The History of the Classic Nursery Rhyme".
- Internet Archive: "Camp and Camino in Lower California" (Arthur Walbridge North, 1910).
- Fingers Of Steel: "Mike Anderson, Songs For Kids".
- Image: Tani Bunchō, Spiders with Commentary, Design Eight from Shazanrō Picture Book, woodblock-printed book; ink and color on paper, 1816. The Cleveland Museum of Art.