"Go Tell Aunt Rhody" is an

English language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...

folk song Folk music is a music genre that includes #Traditional folk music, traditional folk music and the Contemporary folk music, contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be ca ...

of nineteenth-century American origin. It has a

Roud Folk Song Index 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. Roud's Index is a combination of the Broadsid ...

number of 3346. The tune is older, dating to the 18th century. It originated as a

gavotte The gavotte (also gavot, gavote, or gavotta) is a French dance, taking its name from a folk dance of the Gavot, the people of the Gap, Hautes-Alpes, Pays de Gap region of Dauphiné in the southeast of France, where the dance originated, accordin ...

in the 1752 opera '' Le devin du village'' (''The Village Soothsayer'') by

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau (, ; ; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Republic of Geneva, Genevan philosopher (''philosophes, philosophe''), writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment through ...

. The subject of the song is grief associated with loss, in this case from the death of an "old gray goose".

In popular culture

Gomer Pyle Gomer Pyle is a fictional character played by Jim Nabors and introduced in the middle of the third season of '' The Andy Griffith Show''. A naive and gentle auto mechanic, he became a recurring character with the January 1963 episode "Man i ...

( Jim Nabors) sings it as a lullaby to a baby in Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. season 4 episode 29 "And Baby Makes Three" (1968). A version of the song was created by composer Michael A. Levine and musician Jordan Reyne for

Capcom is a Japanese video game company. It has created a number of critically acclaimed and List of best-selling video game franchises, multi-million-selling game franchises, with its most commercially successful being ''Resident Evil'', ''Monster ...

's 2017 survival horror game '' Resident Evil 7: Biohazard''.

References

American children's songs 19th-century songs American folk songs Traditional children's songs {{Folk-song-stub