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Piano sheet music for kids · Nursery rhyme · Level 3: Notes below middle C
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 6/8, 8 bars. 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 washing-day game in a lively 6/8. “Here we go round the” is four quick Cs and an E, then the tune leaps to G and the words run in pairs of quavers, “mul-ber-ry bush”, three times, each a step lower. Bar 4 takes the hand below middle C: B, A, A, G for the third “mulberry bush”, so the thumb slides down to the G below and the hand is on G, A, B, C, D for that bar, and again for “in the” in bar 7. The left hand plays a bass note and a chord on each big beat, C and G7.
Practice tip: Learn bars 1 to 3 in C position, then practise moving the thumb down to the low G for bar 4 and straight back to C for bar 5. The pairs of quavers on “mul-ber” should be quick and even.
The words
Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush; Here we go round the mulberry bush, So early in the morning.
A short history
The game was first written down in the mid-1800s and is in Alice Gomme’s Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland (1894), where children dance in a ring and then mime the week’s chores: this is the way we wash our clothes, iron our clothes, scrub the floor, and so on, each on its own day. “Nuts in May” is sung to the same tune and shares its closing line, “on a cold and frosty morning”.
The tune is far older than the game. It is “Nancy Dawson”, the hornpipe that the dancer Nancy Dawson made famous in a London production of The Beggar’s Opera in 1759, and it was a popular song tune for a century before children took it over.
A local historian has suggested the game began with women prisoners at Wakefield exercising around a mulberry tree in the yard; it is a nice story, but there is no evidence for it.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Traditional (English, 18th-century tune)
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 6/8
- Length
- 8 bars
- Tempo
- Lively, dotted crotchet = 72
- Difficulty
- Level 3: Notes below middle C (piece 104 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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