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The Singing Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland
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Free material for Alice Gomme's 1894 singing games: eight tunes engraved large enough to prop on a piano, those eight games set out to be played from, the register that keeps what she collected apart from what she concluded, and the gazetteer of every county and collector named in the volume.
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Eight tunes to sing them to
PDF · US Letter · 3 pages
The melodies of the eight games in the playing guide — Nuts in May, Hark the Robbers, Green Gravel, Jenny Jones, the Mulberry Bush, Milking Pails, London Bridge and the Jolly Miller — engraved from the notes Gomme took down from the children, at a size you can read at arm's length.
Open PDF80 KBHow to play eight of them
PDF · US Letter · 3 pages
The same eight games set out to be played from rather than read about: how many players, what shape they stand in, what each verse is for and how the game ends. Drawn entirely from Gomme's own descriptions, with every place she leaves something unstated marked.
Open PDF68 KBA Register of Collection and Conjecture
PDF · US Letter · 2 pages
What Gomme collected, what she was told, what she concluded, and how to tell the three apart — class by class, on one sheet. The instrument the edition is built around, and the thing that makes a Victorian folklorist's book usable now.
Open PDF68 KBWhere the games were sung
PDF · US Letter · 3 pages
Every county and country named under a version or a tune in the forty-three games, with the games recorded there, and the collectors who sent the most. Built by reading the 296 attribution lines Gomme printed under her versions.
Open PDF67 KB
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About this material
Alice Bertha Gomme died on 5 January 1938 and this work has been in the public domain everywhere since the end of 2008; the 1894 British imprint puts it there in the United States on its own. Every stave on these sheets was engraved for this edition from the notes — pitch and duration — and not one is a photograph or a tracing of her printed page. The drawings in the 1894 volumes, which are by J. P. Emslie, are not reproduced here: he died in 1913 and his work is out of copyright, but this edition draws its own rather than reprinting his.