Little Jack Horner
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- There are other people named Jack Horner.
Little Jack Horner is a nursery rhyme.
Contents |
[edit] Rhyme
- Little Jack Horner sat in the corner,
- Eating a Christmas pie:
- He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum,
- And said, “What a good boy am I!”
[edit] Origins
Jack was actually Thomas Horner, steward to Richard Whiting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury. Legend has it that, prior to the Abbey's destruction during the Dissolution of the Monasteries commanded by Henry VIII, the Abbot tried to avoid the event by sending Horner to London with a huge Christmas pie that had the deeds of a dozen manors hidden in it. During the journey Horner opened the pie and extracted the deeds of the Manor of Mells in Somerset. While records do indicate that Thomas Horner became the owner of the manor, both his descendants and subsequent owners of Mells Manor have claimed that the legend is untrue.
A 16th-century rhyme noted
- "Hopton, Horner, Smyth and Thynne:
- When Abbotts went out, they came in."
The first publication date for "Little Jack Horner" is 1725, but all the common English nursery rhymes were long in circulation before they appeared in print.
Bob Dylan referred to the rhyme in a lyric, "Little Jack Horner's got nothing on me," from the song Country Pie, off of his album, Nashville Skyline.
Jack Horner is also mentioned in the song Ain't Misbehavin' written by Andy Razaf, Thomas "Fats" Waller and Harry Brooks: "Like Jack Horner, in the corner, don't go nowhere, what do I care..."
British Glam-rock band Slade also used a reference of this rhyme in "Did yer mama ever tell ya".
[edit] Other versions
A Eurosceptic modernizations goes as follows:
- Little Jack Horner MEP
- Sat in the corner of his SUV
- Claiming his Christmas travel expenses.
- He pulled out his pen,
- and scribbled in ten
- thousand euros for a single first class trip to Strasbourg, tax free for us, the tax-payers, to foot the bill of -
- we must be out of our senses![citation needed]
Another version was printed in The Beano in a joke on nursery rhymes:
- Little Jack Horner
- Sat in a corner
- Eating a huge Christmas pie
- He should have checked the sell-by date
- After all, it was mid-July
This version ends with "little Jack Horner" becoming quite ill.
Another version is as follows:
- Little Jack Horner
- Sat in the corner
- Watching the girls go by.
- Along came a beauty and he said, "hi cutie!"
- And that's how he got his black eye![citation needed]
American comedian George Carlin offered this drug-related alternative (along with a version of Old King Cole that suggested that the King's pipe and bowl refer to marijuana):
- Little Jack Horner
- Sat in the corner
- Eating his Christmas pie.
- He stuck in his thumb,
- And pulled out a plum,
- And he said, "Holy shit, am I high!"
There is yet another version, usually read by police to young offenders.
- Little Jack Horner
- Sat in my corner
- Eating my Christmas pie
- He stuck in his thumb
- And pulled out a plum
- And said "What a bad boy am I!"[citation needed]
The character of Jack Horner appears in the Fables comic book by Bill Willingham, where it is revealed that he is also most of the other Jacks featured in fairy tales, nursery rhymes, etc. The now-grown Jack is a chancer, amiable for the most part, but not overly competent, as a rule; as such, most of his get-rich-quick schemes are doomed to failure.
[edit] Reference
- William Stuart Baring-Gould and Ceil Baring-Gould, The Annotated Mother Goose: Nursery Rhymes Old and New, Arranged and Explained, New York: Bramhall House Publishing, 1962
