Old McDonald Had a Farm

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"Old McDonald Had a Farm" is a children's song about a farmer named McDonald (or MacDonald) and the various animals he keeps on his farm. Each verse of the song changes the name of the animal and its respective noise. In many versions the song is cumulative, with the noises from all the earlier verses added to each subsequent verse.

1 Lyrics
2 Early versions
3 Recordings
4 "Old McDonald Had a Band"
5 External links

[edit] Lyrics

In the version commonly sung today, the lyrics are:

Old MacDonald had a farm, E I E I O

And on that farm he had a (animal), E I E I O

With a (animal noise twice) here and a (animal noise twice) there

Here a (animal noise), there a (animal noise), everywhere a (animal noise twice)

Old MacDonald had a farm, E I E I O

[edit] Early versions

The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, published between 1952 and 1964, includes a song called "McDonald's Farm", collected from a Miss Mary Scarborough of Dare County "in 1923 or thereabouts". It has lyrics very close to the common modern version:

Old McDonald had a farm,

E-i ei o

And on that farm he had some chicks,

E-i ei o

With a chick chick here and a chick chick there,

And a here chick, there chick, everywhere chick chick.

Old McDonald had a farm,

E-i ei o.

In the 1917 book Tommy's Tunes, a collection of World War I-era songs by F. T. Nettleingham, the song "Ohio (Old Macdougal Had a Farm)" has quite similar lyrics--though with a slightly different farmer's name and refrain:

Old Macdougal had a farm in Ohio-i-o,

And on that farm he had some dogs in Ohio-i-o,

With a bow-wow here, and a bow-wow there,

Here a bow, there a wow, everywhere a bow-wow.

The Traditional Ballad Index consider the "Tommy's Tunes" version to be the earliest known version of "Old Macdonald Had a Farm", though it cites numerous variants, some of them much older.[1]

Two of these variants were published in Vance Randolph's Ozark Folksongs in 1980. One was "Old Missouri", sung by a Mr. H. F. Walker of Missouri in 1922, a version that names different parts of the mule rather than different animals:

Old Missouri had a mule, he-hi-he-hi-ho,

And on this mule there were two ears, he-hi-he-hi-ho.

With a flip-flop here and a flip-flop there,

And here a flop and there a flop and everywhere a flip-flop

Old Misouri had a mule, he-hi-he-hi-ho.

The other variant from Ozark Folksongs was sung by Mr. Doney Hammondtree of Arkansas in 1942. He said he had learned the song around 1900, and that he "thinks it is the ancestor of another build-up song known as 'Old MacDonald Had a Farm'."

Old Massa had a very fine hog,

In the merry green fields of the lowland,

He turned him in to be seen

In the merry green fields of the lowland,

And it's oink here, and an oink there,

Naff-naff-naff and ev'rybody laugh as they go past

In the merry green fields of the lowland.

George Christy sang a similar version, "In the Merry Green Fields of Oland", in 1865.

A British version of the song, called "The Farmyard, or The Merry Green Fields", was collected in 1908 from a 74-year-old Mrs. Goodey at Marylebone Workhouse, London, and published in Cecil Sharp's Collection of English Folk Songs.

Up was I on my fa-ther's farm

On a May day morn-ing ear-ly;

Feed-ing of my fa-ther's cows

On a May day morn-ing ear-ly,

With a moo moo here and a moo moo there,

Here a moo, there a moo, Here a pret-ty moo.

Six pret-ty maids come and gang a-long o' me

To the mer-ry green fields of the farm-yard.

Perhaps the earliest recorded member of this family of songs is a number from an opera called The Kingdom of the Birds, published in 1719-1720 in Thomas D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy:

In the Fields in Frost and Snows,

Watching late and early;

There I keep my Father's Cows,

There I Milk 'em Yearly:

Booing here, Booing there,

Here a Boo, there a Boo, every where a Boo,

We defy all Care and Strife,

In a Charming Country-Life.

[edit] Recordings

The oldest version listed in The Traditional Ballad Index is the Sam Patterson Trio's "Old MacDonald Had a Farm", released on the Edison label in 1925. This was followed by a version by Gid Tanner & His Skillet Lickers, "Old McDonald Had a Farm" (Columbia, 1927) and "McDonald's Farm" by Warren Caplinger's Cumberland Mountain Entertainers (Brunswick, 1928).[2]

[edit] "Old McDonald Had a Band"

The children's singer/songwriter Raffi recorded a version of the song with barn animals sounds changed to sounds of different instruments "in the band," This version is the last track on his 1976 album Singable Songs for the Very Young.

Renowned computer scientist Donald Knuth jokingly shows the song to have a complexity of $\textstyle O(\sqrt{n})$ in "The Complexity of Songs", attributing its source to "a Scottish farmer".