Little Boy Blue (I)

DESCRIPTION: "Little boy blue, come blow your horn, The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn. Where is the boy who looks after the sheep? Under a haystack, fast asleep. Will you wake him? No, not I, For if I do, he will surely cry."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1744 (Nancy Cock's Song Book according to Devlin)
KEYWORDS: animal
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (7 citations):
Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes 74, "Little Boy Blue" (1 text)
Baring-Gould-AnnotatedMotherGoose #31, p. 46, "(Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn)"
Jack-PopGoesTheWeasel, p. 103, "Little Boy Blue" (1 text)
Dolby-OrangesAndLemons, p. 75, "Little Boy Blue" (1 text)
Delamar-ChildrensCountingOutRhymes, p. 41, "Little Boy Blue" (1 text)
Abrahams-JumpRopeRhymes, #514, "Sheep in the meadow" (1 fragment)
ADDITIONAL: Tim Devlin, _Cracking Humpty Dumpty: An Investigative Trail of Favorite Nursery Rhymes_, Susak Press, 2022, pp. 77-82, "Little Boy Blue" (1 text plus some related lyrics)
Roud #19703
NOTES [154 words]: The Baring-Goulds and Jack-PopGoesTheWeasel both quote with some approval the suggestion by Katherine Elwes Thomas that Little Boy Blue was Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey (Katherine Elwes Thomas, The Real Personages of Mother Goose, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., 1930, pp. 87-91). But the Opies regard this as more Thomasian silliness. So do I. So does Devlin, who devotes several pages to debunking the idea, even noting that a verse that Thomas quoted to support her claim does not seem to have existed!
Devlin, p. 81, mentions another hypothesis connecting this with Charles II. This makes a big more chronological sense, since the poem was printed less than sixty years after Charles's death, but otherwise there isn't much convincing about the notion. Devlin tentatively suspects that this is... just a poem about a shepherd whose sheep strayed, with no hidden message. I agree that this is surely the simplest explanation. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: OO2074

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