Old Cow Died of Whooping Cough

DESCRIPTION: "Old cow died of whooping cough, Baby cow died of measles, Father died with a spoon in his mouth An carried it off to Jesus."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1952 (Browne-AlabamaFolkLyric)
KEYWORDS: cattle death father animal | spoon measles whooping cough
FOUND IN: US(So)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Browne-AlabamaFolkLyric 183, "Old Cow Died of Whooping Cough" (1 short text, 1 tune)
Roud #11368
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Jaybird Died With the Whooping Cough" (theme of animal disease)
cf. "The Sow Took the Measles" (theme of animal disease, especially measles)
cf. "The Cat's Got the Measles and the Dog's Got Whooping Cough" (theme of animal disease)
NOTES [390 words]: Browne-AlabamaFolkLyric notes the similarity to "Jaybird Died With the Whooping Cough." I suspect this is derived from one or another "Whooping Cough" song, but with so little text, it's not possible to tell which.
Incidentally, internet sources report that whooping cough is a human disease which cannot be transmitted to and from animals (let alone birds, as in "Jaybird Died With the Whooping Cough"), but that there are conditions which can result in a mammal coughing in a similar way. I've never heard a bird cough, though.
A baby cow would not die of measles per se, since it's a human disease, but according to a science program I heard on the BBC in June 2020, measles is believed to be a close relative of the cattle disease rinderpest; the estimate is that the two split off around 2500 B.C.E. Thus it is perfectly possibly that the baby cow died of rinderpest, which would look like measles. Incidentally, it can't happen now; good sanitation measures rendered rinderpest extinct in 2011. Measles would be extinct also, were it not for anti-vaxers, but certain sub-types of humans are stupider than cattle....
Rinderpest is certainly highly virulent; it has great cultural significance, e.g., in South Africa, "where it broke out in 1896; described as 'the greatest cultural shock eer sustained by the agricultural community of S.A."; it was "deadly, implacable, moving faster than the railway, through lands where there were no railways, without a cure, without regard to political or other boundaries" (see Jean Branford, A Dictionary of South African English, Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 202).
Incidentally, if we look at a family tree for all the animals mentioned in "measles" songs, cows are closest to sheep, then pigs, then horses. That group then joins another group containing carnivorae such as cats and dogs. That brings us to a major split in the order mammalia, with rodents and primates on the other side of the split. In other words, to oversimplify dramatically, we have a tree that looks like this:
.
./--Cats, cows, dogs, horses, pigs, sheep
.|
.\--Humans, apes, monkeys, rodents, rabbits
.
Thus, as between measles and rinderpest, since pigs, sheep, cats, dogs, and horses are closer to cows than they are to humans, we can hypothesize that they are more prone to rinderpest rather than measles. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.5
File: Brne183

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography