Three Blind Mice: A Song History

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The earliest known printing of "Three Blind Mice" is in Deuteromelia, a book of rounds, catches and songs compiled by Thomas Ravenscroft and printed in London for Thomas Adams in 1609.[1] The Morgan Library & Museum's catalogue record for a first edition lists it as number 13 of the volume's 31 pieces, in a collection written for three and four voices.[1] That same year Ravenscroft brought out Pammelia, a set of 100 catches and rounds that Britannica describes as the first anthology of its kind.[2] The Traditional Ballad Index gives the round Roud number 3753 and treats Ravenscroft's authorship of it as uncertain.[3] The Index quotes Fuld, who calls it "the earliest printed secular song which is still extremely well known."[3]

Small white-and-gray mouse painted on a plain gold-brown silk ground

Shibata Zeshin, Mouse, from Album of Paintings by the Venerable Zeshin, ink, color and gold on silk, 1847. A mouse painted in Japan in 1847, shown for the round's subject; the painting has no connection to the song.

The 1609 words differ noticeably from the version sung now: the woman in the song is a miller's wife, and the tails are never cut off.[3] A political reading, which the Index thinks probably originated with Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930, casts the farmer's wife as Queen Mary I and the mice as the Protestant leaders Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, but the Ballad Index points out that the early text fits this theory poorly, so it is best taken as speculation.[3] Folk song collectors have noted the round in England, Scotland and the northeastern United States, and it appears in group-singing books such as the Boy Scout Songbook and the National 4-H Club Song Book, as well as in a collection of parodies.[3]

John W. Ivimey stretched the rhyme into a full picture-book story, published by Frederick Warne & Co. in London and New York, in which the mice set out from home, meet a string of misfortunes, are cured by a chemist and end up prospering in trade.[4] The copy digitized by the Internet Archive from the New York Public Library is dated 1909.[5] For young mountain dulcimer players, Shelley Stevens arranges the round in Baker's Dozen #9: My First Dulcimer Book, a Fingers Of Steel collection of twelve well-known tunes in DAD tuning, most of them given both as a melody-string version and as a two-string version.[6]

Our book that contains the song "Three Blind Mice"

Sources

  1. The Morgan Library & Museum: "Deuteromelia, or, The second part of Musicks melodie, or Melodius musicke, of pleasant roundelaeis".
  2. Britannica: "Pammelia".
  3. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Three Blind Mice".
  4. Project Gutenberg: "Complete Version of ye Three Blind Mice" by John W. Ivimey.
  5. Internet Archive: "Complete version of ye three blind mice".
  6. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Baker's Dozen #9: My First Dulcimer Book".
  7. Image: Shibata Zeshin, Mouse, from Album of Paintings by the Venerable Zeshin, ink, color and gold on silk, 1847. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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