Skip to My Lou

About this arrangement

An American play-party song in 2/4, two beats to a bar, with the chorus everyone knows. “Skip, skip” is two long notes, each written as two quavers on the same note with the word sung across both, the way the old songbooks print it, and “skip to my Lou” is a crotchet, two quick quavers and a long G. The tune lives in C position: E, C and G for the first line, then a step lower, D and B, for the second, so the thumb reaches down to the B just below middle C. The left hand plays a bass note and a chord on each beat, C for the first phrase and G7 for the answer.

Practice tip: Clap “skip to my Lou” until the two quick notes on “to my” are even, then play it. Keep the thumb hovering over C; it only has to lean down to B.

The words

Skip, skip, skip to my Lou, skip, skip, skip to my Lou, skip, skip, skip to my Lou, skip to my Lou, my darling.

A short history

Skip to My Lou is a play-party song from the American frontier of the 1840s, a dance done without instruments, in communities where fiddles were frowned on, so the dancers sang their own music. One couple at a time lost a partner and had to “skip” to steal another, which is why the verses are full of lost partners and flies in the buttermilk. “Lou” is the Scots word “loo”, meaning love.

Carl Sandburg, in his 1926 life of Abraham Lincoln, describes it as a favourite party game of Lincoln’s youth in southern Indiana, and John and Alan Lomax collected it across the South and Midwest in the 1930s. Like most play-party songs it has as many verses as the singers can make up; this arrangement gives the chorus.

Quick facts

Tune

Traditional (American, 1840s)

Key

C major

Time signature

2/4

Length

8 bars

Tempo

Skipping, crotchet = 112

Difficulty

Level 3: Notes below middle C (piece 43 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