The Old Oaken Bucket: A Song History

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“The Old Oaken Bucket” began as a poem by Samuel Woodworth, who was born in Scituate, Massachusetts, in 1784 and whose family moved in 1798 to the Northey farm in the Greenbush section of town.[1] Woodworth made his career in New York, where he settled in 1809 as a journalist, printer, poet and playwright; his stage piece The Forest Rose (1825) held the boards for decades.[2] According to the Scituate Historical Society, the poem grew out of a hot day in 1817, when memories of his boyhood and of the farm well’s cool water came back to him.[1] Most of the sources consulted here date the poem to 1817, though the Metropolitan Museum of Art gives 1818.[3][4]

Hand-colored print of a farm in a wooded valley, with a boy drinking from a bucket at the well, cattle at a stream and mountains beyond

Frances Flora Bond Palmer, The Old Oaken Bucket, hand-colored lithograph published by Currier & Ives, 1864. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Woodworth printed it under the plain title “The Bucket” in his 1826 collection Melodies, Duets, Trios, Songs, and Ballads, a words-only volume that named a tune for most of its poems; for this one he chose the Scottish song “Jessie, the Flower of Dumblane.”[5] Boston sheet music from C. Bradlee in the 1830s still presented it as set to a “favorite Scotch Air.”[6][7] The melody it is sung to today came from elsewhere: George Kiallmark’s “Araby’s Daughter,” a setting of verses from Thomas Moore’s 1817 Lalla Rookh, which reached Boston in print around 1826.[5][8] Sources differ on when the two were joined. Some date a Kiallmark setting of Woodworth’s words to 1826, while the Library of Congress says only that the tune was fitted to the poem later, and song books of 1843 and 1846 carry the pairing.[3][5][9]

Once joined, words and tune traveled far. The Haydn Quartet recorded the song for Berliner on March 25, 1899.[10] Currier & Ives issued Fanny Palmer’s lithograph of a boy drinking from the bucket at a country well in 1864,[4] and in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia a tramp carries a battered newspaper clipping of the poem in his pocket.[3] Kiallmark’s melody also passed into church use; Hymnary.org lists it in 61 hymnals, including the Latter-day Saint hymn “Do What Is Right.”[11] As an instrumental air it appears in O’Neill’s Music of Ireland (1903),[8] and the bucket itself became the trophy of the Indiana–Purdue football rivalry.[2]

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Sources

  1. Scituate Historical Society: "Ancient Ell at Old Oaken Bucket Homestead".
  2. EBSCO Research Starters: "Samuel Woodworth".
  3. Willa Cather Archive, University of Nebraska–Lincoln: "The Old Oaken Bucket" (Cather's Reading bibliography).
  4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: "Frances Flora Bond Palmer, The Old Oaken Bucket".
  5. Library of Congress: "Greatest Hits 1820–60: 1820 to 1829".
  6. Connecticut College Digital Commons: "Old Oaken Bucket" by Samuel Woodworth Esqr. (sheet music, 1834).
  7. Johns Hopkins University, Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection: "The Old Oaken Bucket".
  8. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Araby's Daughter".
  9. IMSLP Petrucci Music Library: "Araby's Daughter (Kiallmark, George)".
  10. Discography of American Historical Recordings (UC Santa Barbara): "Berliner matrix 023. The old oaken bucket / Haydn Quartet".
  11. Hymnary.org: "Araby's Daughter" (tune by George Kiallmark).