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Piano sheet music for kids · Nursery rhyme · Level 2: Left-hand chords
This Old Man
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 4/4, 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.
The chords in this piece
Your left hand plays four chords in this piece. The shaded keys are the notes of each chord, and the numbers under them are the left-hand fingers (1 is the thumb). Mostly oom-pah: low C, then E and G; low G, then B, D and F. Bar 3 has two held chords, F then C, and the last bar starts on G7 without its low G. All the common piano chords, with diagrams →
C – E – G · Left hand 5 3 1
C, E and G: the home chord. Little finger on C, middle finger on E, thumb on G.
C – F – A · Left hand 5 2 1
C, F and A. The same three notes as F major, rearranged so the little finger stays on C; the thumb stretches up one key to A.
B – D – F · Left hand 5 3 2
B, D and F: G7 without its bottom G. Little finger down to B, finger 3 on D, finger 2 on F.
G – B – D – F · Left hand 5 3 2 1
G, B, D and F, the whole G7 chord. Little finger reaches down to the low G; the other three fingers play B, D and F together.
About this arrangement
The counting song, in plain 4/4 and in C position, starting on G with the little finger. The first two bars are G E G, the same little see-saw twice. From bar 4 the words speed up, so there are pairs of quavers on “with a” and “pad-dy” and a run of four quavers, C D E F, for “give a dog a” in bar 6. The hand stretches up to A once, at the start of bar 3. The left hand plays a bass note and a chord on beats 1 and 3, with F for “he played knick-knack” and G7 for the two “thumb” and “came” bars.
Practice tip: Clap the rhythm of bars 5 and 6 before you play them: “knick-knack pad-dy-whack, give a dog a bone”. The quavers are always in twos, so count “1 and 2 and”.
The words
This old man, he played one, he played knickknack on my thumb; with a knickknack paddywhack, give a dog a bone, this old man came rolling home.
A short history
This Old Man is an English counting song in which each verse plays “knick-knack” on something new: thumb, shoe, knee, door, hive and so on up to ten. It is number 3550 in the Roud Folk Song Index.
The tune was published in 1906 by Cecil Sharp and Sabine Baring-Gould in English Folk-Songs for Schools under the title “Jack Jintle”, and the familiar words were collected in 1937 by Anne Gilchrist, who learned them from her Welsh nurse, and printed in the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.
It became known worldwide after the 1958 film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, in which the children sing it on their march across China; Malcolm Arnold’s arrangement, “The Children’s Marching Song”, was a hit record on both sides of the Atlantic the following year.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Traditional (English, published 1906)
- Key
- C major, C position
- Time signature
- 4/4
- Length
- 8 bars
- Tempo
- Brightly, crotchet = 112
- Difficulty
- Level 2: Left-hand chords (piece 13 of 201)
- Type
- Nursery rhyme
- Hands
- Both: melody in the right hand, chords in the left
- Chords
- C, F and G7 (diagrams above)
- Copyright
- Public domain tune; arrangement by Digital Greenhouse, free for personal and classroom use
Questions and answers
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