Mary Had a Little Lamb

DESCRIPTION: "Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow." Surely you know the rest....
AUTHOR: Words: Sarah Josepha Hale
EARLIEST DATE: 1830 ("Poems For Our Children"); a version with music credited to Lowell Mason was published in 1831 in "Juvenile Lyre or Hymns and Songs")
KEYWORDS: animal children
FOUND IN: US(So) Ireland
REFERENCES (12 citations):
Randolph 360, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (1 text, 1 tune, with some unusual words in the first verse)
Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood, pp. 35-36, "The teacher therefore turned it out"/"Mary had a Little Lamb" (1 partial text plus two parody verses, the first claiming that, if may were alive, she'd have an airplane rather than a lamb, the second being a Mary Had a Little Lamb verse of "Throw It Out the Window")
Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes 341, "Mary had a little lamb" (1 text)
Baring-Gould-AnnotatedMotherGoose #174, pp. 127-128, "(Mary had a little lamb)"
Jack-PopGoesTheWeasel, p. 128, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (1 text)
Dolby-OrangesAndLemons, p. 106, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (1 text)
Delamar-ChildrensCountingOutRhymes, pp. 179-180, "Mary's Lamb" (1 text, with a "sequel" by Emilie Paulssen)
Heart-Songs, p. 345, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (1 text, 1 tune)
Fuld-BookOfWorldFamousMusic, pp. 354-355, "Mary Had a Little Lamb"
Averill-CampSongsFolkSongs, pp. 192, 258-259, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (notes only)
DT, (MARYLAM2* -- if you're broad-minded about what constitutes a version)
ADDITIONAL: Henry Randall Waite, _College Songs: A Collection of New and Popular Songs of the American Colleges_, new and enlarged edition, Oliver Ditson & Co., 1887, p. 51, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (1 text, 1 tune, called the "Hobart Version" and having an "Ain't I Glad To Get Out of the Wilderness" chorus) (part 3, p. 55 in the 1876 editioon); cf pp. 50-51 of the 1876 edition, "Son of a Gambolier," which has "Mary Had a Little Lamb" verses with a "Son of a Gambolier" tune)
Roud #7622
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Mary Had a William Goat" (tune & meter)
cf. "Mary Had a Little Watch" (form)
cf. "Mary Had a Little Lamb, She Also Had a Bear" (form)
cf. "Goodnight Ladies" (partial tune)
cf. "Mary's Little Lamb" by Commodore Jones (in which Mary raises various lambs, which won't follow her and get eaten; she fights the lamb over its wool, etc.)
SAME TUNE:
Mary Had a William Goat (File: San336)
Mary Had a Little Watch (File: NJF171MH)
Mary Had a Little Lamb, She Lived in Alabama ("...and I hit it with a hamma") (Solomon-ZickaryZan, p. 101)
Mary Had a Little Smile ("Mary had a little smile, And oh how it did grow") (Harbin-Parodology, #186, p. 50; Rodeheaver-SociabilitySongs, p. 124)
Mary Had a Little Lamb (2) ("Mary had a little lamb... she put it on the shelf"/"Mary had a little lamb... with green peas on the side") (Harbin-Parodology, #6, p. 10)
Poor Mary/Mary had a swarm of bees (Harbin-Parodology, #48, pp. 18-19; Rodeheaver-SociabilitySongs, p. 123; Averill-CampSongsFolkSongs, p. 192, "Green Trees" (+"Taps") (notes only), p. 192)
Mary's Little Lot/Mary Had a Little Lot ("Mary had a little lot, The soil was very poor, But she had it all the same And struggled to get more") (by Mary C. Hudson) (Greenway-AmericanFolksongsOfProtest, pp. 51-52; Foner, p. 260)
A Retrospect ("Freshman has a little cane, a little cane, a little cane") (Henry Randall Waite, _Carmina Collegensia: A Complete Collection of the Songs of the American Colleges_ first edition 1868, expanded edition, Oliver Ditson, 1876, p. 117)
NOTES [465 words]: Reported to be based on a true story. Which seems likely enough; who would make up something so trite?
The Baring-Goulds report a variant by "modern teenager[s]": The response to "Mary had a little lamb" is "And was the doctor ever surprised!"
Hale is also responsible for one other item in the Ballad Index, "The Watcher."
According to Julian, p, 481, the author's biography is as follows:
Hale, Sarah Josepha, nee Buell, b[orn] at Newport, New Hampshire, 1795, and married to David Hale, a lawyer, who died in 1822. Mrs. Hale edited The Ladies' Magazine, Boston, from 1828; and Godey's Ladies' Book, Phila[delphia], from 1837, besides publishing several works. Her hymn, "Our Father in heaven, we hallow Thy name" (The Lord's Prayer), appeared in Maron & Green's Church Psalmody, 1831, No. 553, in 2 st[anzas] of 8 l[ines]. Mrs. Hale, who was a member of the Protestant Episcopal Church, d[ied] in 1879.
MassachusettsBioDictionary, p. 213, agrees that she died in 1879, but gives her birth date as October 24, 1788; they agree in having her born in Newport. Her parents were Gordon and Martha Buell. Home schooled herself, she became a schoolteacher from 1806 to 1813, when she married lawyer David Hale, by whom she had five children -- the last one posthumous. This forced Sarah to open a millinery shop; she also turned to writing, with her first book of poems published in 1823, the year after her husband died. She moved to Boston upon being offered the editorship of The Ladies' Magazine. "Hale was unique as an editor of a woman's magazine in that she concentrated on substantial matters and accepted only original work."
She did not believe women should leave the home, because they were needed to raise proper children, but she did firmly support women's education (MassachusettsBioDictionary, p. 214). She moved to Philadelphia in 1841, after her youngest son finished at Harvard, and remained there for the rest of her life. She continued to edit Godey's Lady's Book until 1877.
Her DAB entry (volume IV, part 2, p. 111), confirms the 1788 birth date. It lists Horation Emmons Hale, an "ethnologist," as her son and gives an entry on him as well. DAB claims that she wrote at least half the contents of the issues of Ladies' Magazine that she edited, though once Louis A. Godey bought out the Ladies' Magazine and shifted her to the Lady's Book, she gradually devoted herself to particular departments, particularly "Literary Noties" and "Editor's Table," thereby encouraging her readers toward her conservative, "decorous" views.
Thus Hale was extremely influential in the lives of two generations of American women, though I'm not sure she actually made their lives better.
This piece was published (as "Mary's Lamb") in Poems for Our Children in 1830. - RBW
BibliographyLast updated in version 6.6
File: R360

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