Old MacDonald Had a Farm

This is a machine for making noise, and children love it for exactly that. Pick an animal, make its sound, then keep it and add another, and another, until the song is a farmyard of overlapping moos and baas and quacks. It is a cumulative song — one built to grow — and the growing is the whole point.

Its history is longer than its silliness suggests. A song with the same question-and-answer, animal-by-animal shape turns up as early as 1706, in a stage work by Thomas d’Urfey, and again in his songbook of 1719. Through the 1800s and early 1900s folk collectors wrote down farmyard versions all over England, under names like “The Farmyard Song”. The farmer only became “Old MacDonald”, with the tune everyone now uses, in the early twentieth century — the 1917 collection Tommy’s Tunes and the recordings of the 1920s.

The “E-I-E-I-O” that stitches it together means nothing at all. Older versions had quite different nonsense in its place; this is simply the refrain that won. What survives across three centuries is not the words but the game: name a beast, give it a voice, and pile them up until everyone runs out of animals or breath.