There Was An Old Woman And She Had A Little Pig: A Song History

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"There Was an Old Woman and She Had a Little Pig" tells of a pig that stays small however well it is looked after, until it dies and its owners are not long behind it.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index, which files it as Roud 746, dates its earliest known appearance to 1784 in Gammer Gurton's Garland, citing Iona and Peter Opie.[1] That little collection of verses for young children was first printed, undated, at Stockton, and later bibliographers placed it around 1783 or 1784.[2] In the 1810 edition the pig belongs to Betty Pringle, and the Ballad Index lists the Opies' "Little Betty Pringle" among the song's versions.[2][1]

Young woman in an apron pouring a pail into a trough for a pig beside a thatched cottage

Richard Westall, Girl Feeding Pigs, watercolor, 1800. A girl feeding pigs at an English cottage sty in 1800, a few years after the rhyme's earliest known printing in 1784; the watercolor has no connection to the song.

Most of the texts the Ballad Index cites were collected in the United States, from Appalachia, New England, the Midwest, the Southeast and the South, in collections ranging from Cecil Sharp's Southern Appalachian volume and the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina folklore to John and Alan Lomax's American Ballads and Folk Songs.[1] Jean Ritchie of Kentucky printed it in Singing Family of the Cumberlands and again in Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians, and she recorded it as "The Old Woman and the Pig" for her 1954 Elektra album Kentucky Mountain Songs.[1][3] It was still being sung in 1972, when Ann Albin of Anchorage, Kentucky, performed it for a recording now held in Missouri State University's Max Hunter Folk Song Collection.[4]

For dulcimer players, it appears in DAD tuning in Aubrey Atwater's Song By Song, Vol. II, a 157-page tablature book of traditional songs, many of them printed with their words.[5]

Our book that contains the song "There Was An Old Woman And She Had A Little Pig"

Sources

  1. Traditional Ballad Index: "There Was an Old Woman and She Had a Little Pig".
  2. Project Gutenberg: "Gammer Gurton's Garland; Or, The Nursery Parnassus".
  3. Mainly Norfolk: "Jean Ritchie".
  4. Missouri State University, Max Hunter Folk Song Collection: "Little Pig".
  5. Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. II".
  6. Image: Richard Westall, Girl Feeding Pigs, watercolor, 1800. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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