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Piano sheet music for kids · Nursery rhyme · Level 3: Notes below middle C
Little Jack Horner
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 6/8, 8 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 Christmas-pie rhyme in a bouncing 6/8, to James William Elliott’s tune. The hand starts low, with the thumb on the G below middle C: “Lit-tle Jack” is three repeated Gs, then up to C and B, and the next lines do the same thing a step higher each time, A, A, A, D, C and B, B, B, E, D, so the fingers stay on G, A, B, C, D with one stretch to E. “Pie” is held across the bar line with a tie, then a rest. In bar 7 the hand jumps up for “What a good boy”, B, A, G, F, and comes back down to finish on C. The left hand plays a bass note and a chord on each big beat: C, F and G7.
Practice tip: Keep the thumb on the low G for the first six bars and let the three repeated notes bounce. Practise bar 7 on its own: the jump up to A is the only place the hand moves.
The words
Little Jack Horner Sat in a corner, Eating a Christmas pie; He put in his thumb And pulled out a plum, And said, “What a good boy am I!”
A short history
Little Jack Horner was already a well-known figure in 1725, when Henry Carey mocked the rhyme in his poem Namby Pamby, and the words as we know them were printed in Mother Goose’s Melody around 1765. A popular story says the real Jack Horner was Thomas Horner, steward to the last Abbot of Glastonbury, who carried a Christmas pie to Henry VIII with the deeds of twelve manors hidden inside and kept one for himself; the Horner family did acquire Mells Manor in the 1540s, but the pie is a legend and the family has always denied it.
The tune is by James William Elliott, from his National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs (1870), and this arrangement follows it as printed in The Everyday Song Book (Chicago, 1927). Alfred Moffat’s Our Old Nursery Rhymes (1911) gives a different, less familiar tune.
Quick facts
- Tune
- James William Elliott, 1870
- Words
- Traditional (English, 18th century)
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 6/8
- Length
- 8 bars
- Tempo
- Bouncing, dotted crotchet = 66
- Difficulty
- Level 3: Notes below middle C (piece 52 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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