One, Two, Buckle My Shoe | |
---|---|
by Traditional | |
Genre(s) | Nursery rhyme |
Publication date | 1805 |
"One, Two, Buckle My Shoe" is a popular English language nursery rhyme and counting-out rhyme of which there are early occurrences in the US and UK. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 11284.
A common version is given in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes:
Other sources give differing lyrics. [2]
In his The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children (1888), the American collector of folklore, Henry Carrington Bolton (1843–1903), quoted an old lady who remembered a longer version of this rhyme as being used in Wrentham, Massachusetts as early as 1780. Beyond the first four lines, it proceeded:
Some of the final lines Bolton's informant could no longer remember. [3]
In the UK the rhyme was first recorded in Songs for the Nursery, published in London in 1805. This version differed beyond the number twelve, with the lyrics:
A version published five years later in Gammer Gurton's Garland (1810) was titled "Arithmetick" and had the following different lines:
In 1842, James Orchard Halliwell recorded "Shut the door" at the close of the second line. [4]
Since April 2023, a parodied version of the song was populated as an internet meme. [5] [6] [7]
The rhyme was sometimes published alone in illustrated editions. That with lithographs by Caroline R. Baillie (Edinburgh, 1857) had an oblong format [8] showing domestic 18th-century interiors. [9] There were also two editions of the rhyme published from London, both illustrated by Walter Crane. The first was a single volume picture-book ( John Lane, 1869) with end-papers showing a composite of the 1 – 10 sequence and of the 11 – 20 sequence. It was followed in 1910 by The Buckle My Shoe Picture Book, containing other rhymes too. This had coloured full-page illustrations: composites for lines 1-2 and 3–4, and then one for each individual line. [10]
In America the rhyme was used to help young people learn to count and was also individually published. Among these, the distinctive illustrations by Courtland Hoppin (1834-1876) devoted to each verse first appeared in editions published at the end of 1866. [11] In Old Mother Goose's Rhymes And Tales (London and New York, 1889) there was only a single page given to the rhyme, [12] illustrated by Constance Haslewood in the style of Kate Greenaway. [13]