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Piano sheet music for kids · Nursery rhyme · Level 5: A wider range
A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 6/8, 12 bars and a pickup. Press Play to hear it on a real piano, slow it down, or hear one hand at a time; click any note to start from there; print it for the music stand.
About this arrangement
The frog who went courting, with the tune printed by Walter Crane in 1877 and Alfred Moffat in 1912, in a jolly 6/8. The pickup G leads straight up to the C above middle C, so the hand travels from the first bar: down to middle C for “woo-ing go”, then up to the E above for “Heigh-ho!”. Bar 4 has a rest after “Row-ley”; count it, then come in on “A”. The nonsense line “With a rowly, powly, gammon and spinach” runs up the scale in quavers (eighth notes) from D to B. The left hand plays a bass note and a chord on each big beat.
Practice tip: Say the nonsense words in rhythm first, “row-ly, pow-ly, gam-mon and spin-ach”, then play bars 9 and 10 to them. Keep the rest in bar 4 a real silence.
The words
A frog he would awooing go, Heighho! said Rowley; A frog he would awooing go, Whether his mother would let him, or no, With a rowly, powly, gammon and spinach, Heighho! said Anthony Rowley.
A short history
A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go is one of the oldest songs in the nursery. A ballad called “A Moste Strange Weddinge of the Frogge and the Mouse” was licensed for printing in London in 1580, and a version with a nonsense refrain appeared in Thomas Ravenscroft’s songbook Melismata in 1611. It is number 16 in the Roud Folk Song Index, where it is grouped with the American Frog Went A-Courting.
The “Heigh-ho, says Rowley” chorus belongs to a version that was sung on the London stage in the early 1800s. In the full song the frog visits Miss Mouse, a cat and her kittens break up the party, and a duck swallows the frog on the way home, so only the first verse is printed here.
The tune is the one in Walter Crane’s The Baby’s Opera (1877) and Alfred Moffat’s Little Songs of Long Ago (1912), whose words are used.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Traditional (English; tune as printed by Walter Crane, 1877, and Alfred Moffat, 1912)
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 6/8
- Length
- 12 bars and a pickup
- Tempo
- Jauntily, dotted crotchet = 60
- Difficulty
- Level 5: A wider range (piece 165 of 201)
- Type
- Nursery rhyme
- Hands
- Both: melody in the right hand, chords in the left
- Copyright
- Public domain tune; arrangement by Digital Greenhouse, free for personal and classroom use
Questions and answers
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