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Piano sheet music for kids · Nursery rhyme · Level 6: Moving on
Pat-a-Cake
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 clapping rhyme, set to the tune printed in Alfred Moffat’s Our Old Nursery Rhymes (1911). “Pat-a-cake” is a broken C chord, C, E, G, twice over, and most of the piece sits in C position with B just below the thumb. Bars 7 and 8 are the new thing: the tune runs straight up the scale from D to B and the F is sharpened, F sharp, the black key, marked with a sharp sign each time. The last four bars repeat “for baby and me” and settle back onto C. The left hand plays a bass note and a chord on each big beat, and under the scale in bars 7 and 8 it rests on a single G.
Practice tip: Find F sharp before you start: the black key just to the right of F. Play bars 7 and 8 slowly, saying the finger numbers, until the run up to B is even.
The words
Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake, baker's man! That I will master as quick as I can; Prick it and nick it and mark it with T, And there will be plenty for baby and me, For baby and me, For baby and me, And there will be plenty for baby and me.
A short history
“Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man” is one of the oldest English rhymes still in use. A nurse recites it to her charges in Thomas D’Urfey’s comedy The Campaigners (1698), and it was printed with its familiar words in Mother Goose’s Melody around 1765, where the cake is marked with a T. Marking a cake with an initial made sense when many families had no oven of their own and sent their baking to the local baker, who had to hand the right cake back to the right household.
The tune here is the one Alfred Moffat printed in Our Old Nursery Rhymes (London, 1911), with illustrations by H. Willebeek Le Mair, a book that stayed in print for decades and fixed the tunes many English-speaking children learnt.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Traditional (English, 18th century; tune as printed by Alfred Moffat, 1911)
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 6/8
- Length
- 12 bars
- Tempo
- Briskly, dotted crotchet = 72
- Difficulty
- Level 6: Moving on (piece 200 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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