Cumulative song

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A cumulative song is a song whose verses are built from earlier verses, usually by adding a new stanza to the previous verse. A simple cumulative song having n verses is structured as

stanza₁

stanza₁ stanza₂

⋮

stanza₁ stanza₂ … stanza_n

sometimes with a common chorus included with each verse. When sung, the repeated stanzas are sometimes varied or abbreviated. Cumulative songs are popular for group singing, in part because they require relatively little memorization of lyrics, and because remembering the previous verse to concatenate it to form the current verse can become a kind of game.

[edit] Examples of cumulative songs

"The Twelve Days of Christmas"
"Green Grow the Rushes, O"
"There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly"
"Old McDonald Had a Farm"
"Alouette"
"Eh, Cumpari!"
"I Have a Song to Sing, O" from Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta The Yeomen of the Guard
"Children go where I send thee"
"I Bought Me A Cat"
"The Green Grass Grew All Around"
"The Rattlin' Bog"
"The Barley Mow"
"There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea" [1]

[edit] Examples of cumulative songs in Judaism

Yiddish folk music contains many prominent examples of cumulative songs, including "?װאָס װעט זײַן אַז משיח װעט קומען" and "מה אספּרה," or "What Will Happen When the Messiah Comes?" and "Who Can Recall" (a Yiddish version of the Passover song "Echad mi yode'a").

The Passover seder contains two cumulative songs: Echad mi yode'a and Chad Gadya.