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Piano sheet music for kids · Folk song · Level 4: Up to the C above
Billy Boy
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 2/4, 16 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
A teasing question-and-answer song: “Oh where have you been, Billy Boy?” It is in 2/4 with a pickup of two quavers (eighth notes), E and F, slurred together on the one word “Oh”. The right hand sits in C position with the thumb on middle C, stretching up to the C above for “been” and down to B below middle C near the end. Two things are new: the tie in bars 7 and 8, where “Bil-ly” is held over the bar line, and the dotted pair on “she’s a” in bar 12. The left hand plays a bass note and a chord in every bar, C and G7, with F under “she’s a”.
Practice tip: Sing it while you play, it helps the rhythm: the questions are bars 1 to 8 and the answer is bars 9 to 16. Hold the tied D in bars 7 and 8 for its full length before “I have”.
The words
Oh where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Oh where have you been, charming Billy? I have been to seek a wife, she's the joy of my life, she's a young thing and cannot leave her mother.
A short history
“Billy Boy” is number 326 in the Roud Folk Song Index. It is best known in the American form used here, in which Billy is asked where he has been, and answers that he has been to seek a wife, who “is a young thing and cannot leave her mother”. Later verses ask whether she can bake a cherry pie, and the last one works out, with a joke, how old she really is.
The American song is a variant of an English folk song, “My Boy Billy”, which Ralph Vaughan Williams collected and published in 1912 in Novello’s School Songs.
The tune has had a life in jazz too: the pianist Ahmad Jamal arranged it in 1951, and the Red Garland trio played it on Miles Davis’s 1958 album Milestones.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Traditional (American)
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 2/4
- Length
- 16 bars and a pickup
- Tempo
- Cheerfully, crotchet = 96
- Difficulty
- Level 4: Up to the C above (piece 133 of 201)
- Type
- Folk song
- 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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