15
Playground Rhymes and the Oral Tradition
Iona Opie
The traditional verbal lore available to children up to the age of about eleven includes
nursery rhymes, nonsense and satirical verse, riddles, spooky narratives, verses to chant
at particular times of the year, trickery and repartee, formulas with which to regulate
relationships, counting-out rhymes, and the songs and dialogues that accompany
various kinds of games.
A child’s first experience of the charms of tradition is in the form of a lullaby (the word
means ‘lull to bye-byes’, that is, to sleep). Lullabies must be the most instinctive music
in the world; a woman with a child in her arms automatically rocks it and sings. Even
today, the song may be only a repetition of meaningless hushing syllables sung to a
spontaneous tune, but more often than not a young mother will sing a lullaby handed
down in her own family, possibly for generations. The tune is more important than the
words, for if the tune is soothing, the infant cannot know whether it is being bribed into
quietness (Dinna mak’ a din,/An’ ye’ll get a cakie/When the baker comes in) or
threatened (Baby, baby, naughty baby/ Hush you squalling thing, I say). Nor can it be
frightened by the story line of the best known of all lullabies, Hush-a-bye, baby, on the
tree top,/When the wind blows the cradle will rock,/When the bough breaks the cradle
will fall,/Down will come baby, cradle and all.
Lullabies come under the heading of nursery rhymes, that comprehensive collection of
songs and verses which assist grown-ups in pacifying and entertaining children from
birth to the age of about 5. Known as Mother Goose rhymes in the eighteenth century
after the influential nursery rhyme booklet Mother Goose’s Melody, (c.1765), probably
compiled by Oliver Goldsmith, they have retained the appellation in the USA. In England
the term ‘nursery rhymes’ began to be used soon after the turn of the century, promoted
by Ann and Jane Taylor’s immensely successful Rhymes for the Nursery (1806), and
James Kendrew of York’s pirated edition of 1812, which was entitled Nursery Rhymes, for
the Amusement of Children. The earliest record of the term having entered the language
is in The British Review, August 1815, when the reviewer of Wordsworth’s The Excursion
took to task those who were currently condemning his poems as being ‘beneath the
dignity of what they call poetry, and as worthy only of being celebrated in nursery-
rhymes’.
The huge diversity of the nursery rhyme corpus (there are 800 rhymes in The Oxford
Nursery Rhyme Book (Opie and Opie 1955) includes verses suited to every practical
purpose as well as songs to take the imagination soaring. There are baby games to play
with the child’s features, fingers and toes, dandling rhymes and knee rides; and