For: Psyence Fiction (Album)

The term nursery rhyme is used for ‘traditional' songs for young children in Britain and many English speaking countries, but usage only dates from the nineteenth century and in North America the older ‘Mother Goose Rhymes' is still often used.

Lullabies

Main: lullaby The oldest children's songs of which we have records are lullabies, intended to help a child sleep. Lullabies can be found in every human culture. The English term lullaby is thought to come from 'lu, lu' or 'la la' sound made by mothers or nurses to calm children, and 'by by' or 'bye bye', either another lulling sound, or a term for good night. Until the modern era lullabies were usually only recorded incidentally in written sources. The Roman nurses' lullaby, 'Lalla, Lalla, Lalla, aut dormi, aut lacte', is recorded in a scholium on Persius and may be the oldest to survive.

Many medieval English verses associated with the birth of Jesus take the form of a lullaby, including 'Lullay, my liking, my dere son, my sweting' and may be versions of contemporary lullabies. However, most of those used today date from the seventeenth century onwards. Probably the most famous 'Rock-a-bye, baby on a tree top' is not recorded until the late eighteenth century.

Early nursery rhymes

From the later middle ages we have records of short children's rhyming songs, often as marginalia. From the mid-sixteenth century they begin to be recorded in English plays. Most nursery rhymes were not written down until the eighteenth century, when the publishing of children's books began to move from polemic and education towards entertainment, but we have evidence for many rhymes existing before this, including 'To market, to market' and 'Cock a doodle doo', which date from at least the late sixteenth century.

The first English collections were Tommy Thumb's Song Book and a sequel, Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, are both thought to have been published before 1744, and at this point such songs were known as 'Tommy Thumb's songs'. The publication of John Newbery's, Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle (c.1785), is the first record we have of many classic rhymes, still in use today. These rhymes seem to have come from a variety of sources, including traditional riddles, proverbs, ballads, lines of Mummers' plays, drinking songs, historical events, and, it has been suggested, ancient pagan rituals. Roughly half of the current body recognised 'traditional' English rhymes were known by the mid-eighteenth century.

The nineteenth century

In the early nineteenth century printed collections of rhymes began to spread to other countries, including Robert Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826) and in the United States, Mother Goose's Melodies (1833). From this period we sometimes know the origins and authors of rhymes, like 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star', which combined an eighteenth-century French tune with a poem by English writer Jane Taylor and 'Mary Had a Little Lamb', written by Sarah Josepha Hale of Boston in 1830.