Something that’s a bit strange, when you think about it, is the fact that many children’s songs have tunes that are ripped off straight from old timey marching songs. Here in the US, civil war songs lend their tunes to a whole host of nursery rhymes. It’s so common that you hardly think about it, but in a way, that’s somewhat macabre…
Is there a specific reason why this is the case? I can think of two factors, but I’m curious if any anthropologists have looked into this at a deeper level.
The two factors I can think of are:
Soldiers came home and continue singing/humming marching songs. When they have children, either they or their wives (who would inevitably be subjected to their husbands’ bad humming until the songs worm their way into their ears as well) naturally turn to these tunes when making up nonsense rhymes for their kids.
Marching songs, by their nature, are simple and repetitive - exactly what you want for a children’s song.
It’s hard to answer this without knowing which marching songs and nursery rhymes you have in mind, but old-timey ballad culture involved many, many sets of lyrics being set to the same pre-existing tune. You’d buy a “broadside” – a single sheet of paper with printed lyrics, often dealing with some recent event, like a crime or battle – but there wouldn’t be any sheet music, just the name of the tune that they were to be sung to. That was all you needed, because everyone already knew the tunes.
“John Brown’s Body” (whose tune is reused for a second marching song, “Battle Hymn of the Republic”) is one example with dozens of nursery rhymes using that tune.
Looking it up, it does look like the tune itself is even older than those two songs. But even so, if the marching songs popularized the tune enough that it reached children’s songs, my question still applies.
Might be more accurate to say that a handful of tunes were used for many purposes, including nursery rhymes and marching songs. The same is still true of hymns today – many of them are set to familiar tunes which originally might not have been hymns at all. Flow Gently Sweet Afton, for example, has a number of popular hymns set to it.
Originality was not the virtue it is today, and a tune that is both familiar and easy to sing is still very useful in contexts of group singing.
In a world where that was the norm, a catchy, well-known tune would be reused any number of times for any number of types of songs. The Star Spangled Banner was written this way. In fact Key did so twice, but the one version became famous.
I’m not coming up with any nursery rhymes taken from Civil War marching songs, though. Could the OP please give a list?
Could be the other way around, where guys who’s enjoyed Au clair de la Lune as kids sang it to calm themselves as they marched into machine gun fire.
The nursery rhymes I experienced were songs my mom enjoyed from her 1940s girlhood, like the Hut-sut song or Two Little Fishies and a Mommy Fishy too. Captain Kangaroo had military music mixed in with all the other stuff he played: children’s, jazz, country swing, etc.
School songs, though, did include marches like Dixie or Goober Peas. I think the first-wave baby boomers had more martial music, but us Generation Jones kids came in during the Folk craze of the early 60s, and got the Erie Canal, old Unionization songs and “Negro Spirituals” as well as Yankee Doodle and the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Which dozens of nursery rhymes ? - I found one about Peter Rabbit with a fly on his nose in both English and Dutch but I don’t know how well-known that is. There’s a Christmas carol - but that’s not a nursery rhyme and there is , of course “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school” but that’s not a nursery rhyme either.
I’ll have to start making note of specific ones as I hear them (and I’m hearing many nursery rhymes lately, LOL). But yeah there were a couple about a someone who had a something upon his something else, one about a kid who got their feet/calves/knees in the pool but didn’t get their bathing suit wet yet, and a couple more, all of which reused this tune. Oh, and there was one that was straight up “Glory, glory hallelujah”. This is all on one nursery rhyme CD, by the way.
Oh, I think I’ve got it now. You aren’t really talking about nursery rhymes which would be traditional songs like “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and " Sing a Song of Sixpence" or “London Bridge is falling down” . You’re talking about children’s song compilations that have some nursery rhymes but also have many songs that are not nursery rhymes - for example , She Waded in the Water could not have been written before there were bathing suits that could remain dry while the thighs were wet.
Lots of those songs use the tune of other songs - I don’t know if it’s exactly that marching songs are more commonly used or that the other songs are simply less familiar. Do Your Ears Hang Low uses the tune of Turkey in the Straw but how many people only know that tune as the Murphy’s oil soap jingle or the music the ice-cream truck plays? Head and Shoulders , Knees and Toes uses the tune of There Is a Tavern in the Town - but I had never heard of the latter until I looked up the former just now.
Maybe I’m missing something, but why is She Waded in the Water (I suppose that’s what it is called, haha) not a nursery rhyme? It isn’t anywhere near as ubiquitous as Baa Baa Black Sheep but it still feels like the same class of thing, even if a much more minor example.
There are probably many slightly different definitions of “nursery rhyme” but it isn’t just any children’s song. At the least , a nursery rhyme is a traditional rhyme or song - “traditional” meaning that it existed before the 20th century and probably earlier (most date to the 17th or 18th century). She Waded in the Water is not a nursery rhyme because it is not traditional - it couldn’t have been written until at least the early 1900s because that was the earliest that you would have found something called a “bathing suit” that would allow the thighs to be wet but the suit to be dry - prior to that “bathing costumes” would have been knee-length,
Nearly all nursery rhymes are children’s songs - but not nearly every children’s song is a nursery rhyme.
If the OP is asking why modern children’s songs are using old tunes, I would guess it’s 100% because old tunes are out of copyright. Therefore 0% of the revenue has to go the songwriter.
What more readily comes to mind is so many that are ripped off from a French children’s melody from the 1700s (which was then later ripped off by Mozart): A-B-C song, Twinkle Twinkle Little Start, and Baa Baa Black Sheep.
That’s exactly how it is sung on the disk of children’s ssongs my daughter received, performed by a chorus of annoyingly high pitched kids of course. People were giving me a lot of crap for thinking it was dirty!
