Three fingers and one stretch
Put your right hand’s thumb on middle C (t), the next finger on D (y) and the middle finger on E (u). Those three keys carry nearly all of the song. Only twice does the tune step outside them, to G (o), which the little finger or the fourth finger can reach without moving the hand.
Reading the two lines
- Line one walks down and back, E D C D, then repeats E three times, the last one held. The same pattern follows on D (
y y y - -), and the line ends with a jump up to the two Gs, the only high point of the song. - Line two begins exactly like line one. After the fourth E it turns home:
u y y u y t, finishing on a long C.
Because the two lines share their opening, a child who has learned line one already knows half of line two. The part to practise is the ending, where E, D, D, E, D and C come quickly one after another.
Practising with a young child
Start with the slow speed so the child hears the whole tune before trying it. Then let them press the glowing key; the piano waits for the correct note, so a slip costs nothing. A good second step is to change the Labels menu to note names and say E, D, C aloud while playing: the song becomes an easy way to learn three note names at once.
Words from 1830, a tune from the songbooks
The poem is Sarah Josepha Hale’s “Mary’s Lamb”, published in Boston in 1830 in her collection Poems for Our Children. Lowell Mason, the Boston hymn composer, gave it a melody in his Juvenile Lyre of 1831, but that setting is not the tune children sing now. The familiar tune turns up in old songbooks under other words: The Most Popular Home Songs (New York: Hinds, Noble & Eldredge, copyright 1908) prints it as the “Merrily we roll along” refrain of Good-Night, Ladies! Both poem and tune are long out of copyright.
The same opening, spelled with note names instead of computer keys, is on the piano with letters.