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Piano sheet music for kids · Nursery rhyme · Level 4: Up to the C above
Little Boy Blue
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 6/8, 12 bars. Press Play to hear it on a real piano, slow it down, or hear one hand at a time; click any note to start from there; print it for the music stand.
About this arrangement
The sleepy shepherd boy, with the tune Alfred Moffat printed in 1911, in a lilting 6/8, two big beats to a bar. The first line sits in C position with the thumb on middle C, and the word “blow” is sung over two notes, A and G. In bars 5 to 8 the tune climbs, so the hand moves up to play around the C above, and bar 5 has a dotted quaver (dotted eighth note) and a semiquaver for “boy that”. The last line comes back down for “Will you wake him?” The left hand plays a bass note and a chord on each big beat, using C, F and G.
Practice tip: Learn bars 1 to 4 first; bars 9 and 10 are almost the same. Then practise moving the hand up for bar 5 and back down for bar 9 until the move feels calm.
The words
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn, The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn. Where's the boy that looks after the sheep? He's under the haycock fast asleep. Will you wake him? No, not I! For if I do, he'll be sure to cry.
A short history
Little Boy Blue is number 11318 in the Roud Folk Song Index. The earliest known printing is in Tommy Thumb’s Little Song Book of about 1744, but the rhyme may be older: Shakespeare’s King Lear has a mad song about a sleeping shepherd whose sheep are in the corn. Iona and Peter Opie, editors of the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, rejected the popular idea that the boy stands for Cardinal Wolsey.
A haycock is a small heap of hay left in the field to dry. One historian suggested the boy was a hayward, the village officer who guarded the crops and blew a horn when animals strayed into them. In 1799 Harriet Abrams published the first four lines as a glee for three voices.
The tune used here is the one Alfred Moffat harmonised for Our Old Nursery Rhymes, published by Augener in London in 1911 with pictures by Henriette Willebeek le Mair.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Traditional (English, printed c. 1744; tune as printed by Alfred Moffat, 1911)
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 6/8
- Length
- 12 bars
- Tempo
- Lilting, dotted crotchet = 60
- Difficulty
- Level 4: Up to the C above (piece 141 of 201)
- Type
- Nursery rhyme
- Hands
- Both: melody in the right hand, chords in the left
- Copyright
- Public domain tune; arrangement by Digital Greenhouse, free for personal and classroom use
Questions and answers
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