"Cock a Doodle Doo" (

Roud The Roud Folk Song Index is a database of around 250,000 references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world. It is compiled by Steve Roud (born 1949), a former librarian in the London ...

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English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to t ...

nursery rhyme A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and many other countries, but usage of the term dates only from the late 18th/early 19th century. The term Mother Goose rhymes is interchangeable with nursery rhymes. From ...

Lyrics

The most common modern version is:

Cock a doodle doo! My dame has lost her shoe, My master's lost his fiddling stick And knows not what to do.I. Opie and P. Opie, ''The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), p. 128.

Origins

The first two lines were used to mock the

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". The first full version recorded was in ''Mother Goose's Melody'', published in London around 1765. By the mid-nineteenth century, when it was collected by

James Orchard Halliwell James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (born James Orchard Halliwell; 21 June 1820 – 3 January 1889) was an English Shakespearean scholar, antiquarian, and a collector of English nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Life The son of Thomas Halliwell ...

, it was very popular and three additional verses, perhaps more recent in origin, had been added:

Cock a doodle doo! What is my dame to do? Till master's found his fiddling stick, She'll dance without her shoe. Cock a doodle doo! My dame has found her shoe, And master's found his fiddling stick, Sing cock a doodle do! Cock a doodle doo! My dame will dance with you, While master fiddles his fiddling stick, And knows not what to do.

(Verse four's alternative ending line: For Dame and Doodle Doo.)

Notes

{{authority control English nursery rhymes Songwriter unknown Year of song unknown English folk songs English children's songs Traditional children's songs