Annotation:Wedding of the Frog and Mouse (The)

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WEDDING OF THE FROG AND MOUSE, THE. AKA - "Frog He would a-Wooing Go (A)." English, Ballad Air (3/4 time). G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). One part. The air for this song (which Horace M. Belden believes is the most widely known song in the English language) first appears in Thomas Ravenscroft's Melismata (1611). It is an early version of the song ("Froggie Went A-Courtin'") famous in British and American traditional folklore and folksong, of which the earliest appearance was in Wedderburn's Complaynt of Scotland (1549) where it is called "The frog cam to the myl dur." Another early version is found in a broadside text of 1580, called "A moste Strange weddinge of the ffrogge and the mowse" (Rollins). See also the extensive note on this tune and text in Norman Cazden's (et al, 1982) Catskill Mountain (New York) collected "Missie Mouse."

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Chappell (Popular Music of the Olden Times, vol. 1), 1859; p. 142.

Recorded sources:

See also listing at:
See the Ballad Index entry on the 'Frog/Mouse Courting' song group [1]



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