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Piano sheet music for kids · Children's song · Level 3: Notes below middle C
Oh Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone?
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 3/8, 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
Septimus Winner’s song of 1864, with the words and tune as Alfred Moffat printed them in 1911, in a lilting 3/8: three quavers (eighth notes) to a bar. It starts on a pickup, “Oh”, on the G above middle C, and the hand has to move: “where, oh where” comes down through E to C and B, and “gone” and “long” drop to the G below middle C, an octave under the start, before the tune jumps straight back up. “Be” and the last “where” are each sung over two notes joined by a slur. The left hand plays a bass note and two chords in every bar, C and G7.
Practice tip: Practise bars 4 and 5 slowly: the thumb plays the low G for “gone”, then the hand jumps up an octave for “Oh”. Look at where you are going before you jump.
The words
Oh where, oh where is my little dog gone? Oh where, oh where can he be? With his ears cut short and his tail cut long, Oh where, oh where is he?
A short history
Septimus Winner (1827–1902) of Philadelphia, who also wrote Listen to the Mockingbird, published “Der Deitcher’s Dog” in 1864. His words were in a comic German-American dialect, “Oh where, oh where ish mine little dog gone”, and the later verses were about beer and sausages.
The tune was older: the German folk song “In Lauterbach hab’ ich mein’ Strumpf verlor’n”, about a lost stocking, which singers from the Tyrol had made popular in the 1820s.
Children kept the first verse, smoothed out the dialect and made it a nursery song. Alfred Moffat included it in Our Old Nursery Rhymes, published by Augener in London in 1911 with pictures by the Dutch illustrator Henriette Willebeek le Mair, and that is the version used here.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Septimus Winner, 1864, to a German folk tune
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 3/8
- Length
- 16 bars and a pickup
- Tempo
- Lilting, dotted crotchet = 56
- Difficulty
- Level 3: Notes below middle C (piece 88 of 201)
- Type
- Children's 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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