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Piano sheet music for kids · Nursery rhyme · Level 3: Notes below middle C
The North Wind Doth Blow
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 6/8, 8 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 winter rhyme about the robin, in 6/8, with the tune from Walter Crane’s The Baby’s Bouquet (1878). It starts on a pickup, “The”, on the G below middle C, played by the thumb. Then the hand moves up so the thumb sits on the B below middle C, with B, C, D, E and F under the five fingers, and the thumb reaches back down to G for “poor thing? He’ll” in bar 4. “Blow” and “barn” are each sung over two notes, C and then B, joined by a slur. The left hand plays a bass note and a chord on each big beat, C and G7.
Practice tip: Find the two hand places before you start: thumb on low G for the first note, thumb on B for the rest. Play bar 4 slowly until the reach down to G feels easy.
The words
The north wind doth blow And we shall have snow, And what will poor Robin do then, poor thing? He'll sit in a barn To keep himself warm, And hide his head under his wing, poor thing!
A short history
James Orchard Halliwell included this rhyme in The Nursery Rhymes of England, his nineteenth-century collection. The robin in it is the European robin, a small bird with an orange-red breast that stays in Britain all winter, which is why it became a Christmas bird on cards and in carols. In the rhyme it shelters in a barn with its head tucked under its wing.
The tune is the one in The Baby’s Bouquet (1878), Walter Crane’s book of nursery songs arranged by his sister Lucy. Alfred Moffat printed a slightly different version in Little Songs of Long Ago (1912): it begins the same way and has the same shape, but takes a different path in several bars, a sign that the tune was passed on by ear before anyone wrote it down.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Traditional (English; tune as printed in The Baby’s Bouquet, 1878)
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 6/8
- Length
- 8 bars and a pickup
- Tempo
- Gently, dotted crotchet = 56
- Difficulty
- Level 3: Notes below middle C (piece 83 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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