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Piano sheet music for kids · Folk song · Level 6: Moving on
The Miller of Dee
Free beginner piano sheet music: A minor, 6/8, 16 bars and a pickup. 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
A jolly English song in A minor and 6/8, two big beats to a bar, about a miller who cares for nobody. It starts on a pickup, E, and every line ends with a long A and the pickup into the next. The G sharps are written in each time, and there is one F sharp, in bar 13 on “no-bod-y”, which comes with a dotted rhythm, long-short. The third line climbs to the E above the C for “this the bur-den”, so the hand moves up and comes back. The left hand plays a chord on each big beat: A minor, E, C, G and one D minor.
Practice tip: Feel two big beats in each bar and keep it bouncing. Look for the sharp signs before you start: the right hand’s Gs are G sharps, but the left hand’s G chord uses a plain G.
The words
There was a jolly miller once lived on the River Dee; He worked and sang from morn till night, no lark more blithe than he. And this the burden of his song for ever used to be: I care for nobody, no, not I, and nobody cares for me.
A short history
“The Miller of Dee”, also sung as “There Was a Jolly Miller Once”, is number 503 in the Roud Folk Song Index. It first appeared in Isaac Bickerstaffe’s play with songs, Love in a Village, staged in 1762, and later writers made their own versions of his words.
The Dee is the river that runs from the mountains of Wales past the city of Chester, where a weir built in the Middle Ages kept the water high for the mills along its banks. The miller of the song is cheerful and independent: in the second verse he boasts that no lawyer, surgeon or doctor ever had a penny from him.
Beethoven arranged a version for three voices and piano trio in 1819, and Benjamin Britten made a well-known arrangement for voice and piano in 1947.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Traditional (English; words after Isaac Bickerstaffe, 1762)
- Key
- A minor
- Time signature
- 6/8
- Length
- 16 bars and a pickup
- Tempo
- Cheerfully, dotted crotchet = 60
- Difficulty
- Level 6: Moving on (piece 199 of 201)
- Type
- Folk song
- 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
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