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Piano sheet music for kids · Nursery rhyme · Level 5: A wider range
Sing a Song of Sixpence
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 2/4, 16 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 blackbird rhyme in 2/4, and a piece where the right hand has to move. It opens high, on the C above middle C, with a dotted quaver and semiquaver for “Sing a”, and runs down to G; then “six-pence” drops to the E below. Put the thumb on G to start, so C is under finger 4, and reach down with the thumb for the low E and D. The second half, from bar 9, climbs to D and E above the high C before “set be-fore the King” walks home to C. The left hand keeps to chords on the beat: C, D minor, G7, and F and G in the last line.
Practice tip: Learn the last four bars first, “was not that a dainty dish”: they are plain quavers, E D C B, C B A G, and they teach the hand where the high notes are. Then the dotted “Sing a” at the start is just long-short.
The words
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye; four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie; when the pie was open'd the birds began to sing. Oh, was not that a dainty dish to set before the King?
A short history
A verse beginning “Sing a Song of Sixpence” was printed around 1744 in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, where it was “four and twenty naughty boys” who were baked in the pie. The blackbirds arrived in the 1780s, in Gammer Gurton’s Garland, and the verses about the king in his counting-house, the queen eating bread and honey and the maid in the garden followed in the 19th century. The Roud Folk Song Index lists the rhyme as number 13191.
Live birds in a pie were a real banquet trick. An Italian cookbook of 1549, translated into English in 1598 as Epulario, gives instructions for a pie that lets live birds fly out when it is cut, to the delight of the guests.
The tune used here is the familiar one, as printed in Alfred Moffat’s Our Old Nursery Rhymes of 1911, with “a pock-et full of” in the plain rhythm most people sing.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Traditional (English, 18th century)
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 2/4
- Length
- 16 bars
- Tempo
- Brightly, crotchet = 104
- Difficulty
- Level 5: A wider range (piece 162 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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