As Simple as a Children’s Song

So Sam (my two year old) got a video in one of his many piles o’ gifts, that includes a couple of cartoon videos of children’s songs. One of the songs is done absolutely wonderfully: Olive A. Wadsworth’s “Over in the Meadow.”

I had never heard the song/rhyme before, although a quick Google search showed me that I was obviously in the minority. It’s old and popular.

I plan to either get a CD with the song on it, or maybe just copy the song from the tape and put it on a CD for portability. (If the music industry has its way, this will soon be illegal, even though I own the video, but that’s another story.)

Anyway, I decided to get the lyrics to the song down so I could sing (or at least read) them to Sam.

And that’s when I bumped into one of the downsides of the Net: Too damn much information. In this case, a simple task of “get the lyrics” was complicated by the fact that there are various versions of the song.

You would think that something from 18-something would be pretty set in stone, but no — I couldn’t find a definitive version.

One song, many versions.

For example, the version in the video starts:

Over in the meadow, in the sand in the sun,
lived an old mother toadie and her little toadie one.
“Wink!” said the mother; “I wink!” said the one…

But several versions I found start with “…lived an old mother turtle” and have her instructing her little turtle to “dig.”

The last verse has even more variations. The one in the video has

Over in the meadow, in a sly little den,
lived a gray mother spider and her little spiders ten.
“Spin!” said the mother; “We spin!” said the ten.
So they spun lacy webs in their sly little den.

But others have “little beavers ten” with the mother giving them the odd instruction to “beave.” Go figure.

And then there are the re-writes. Zoiks. There are politically correct versions that alternate between “old mother _____” and “old daddy _____,” and I’m sure some Christian group will want to change the verse with the “gay mother cricket and her little crickets seven.”

There are a few, like one by Richard Thompson with entirely different lyrics for no good reason that I could think of.

And then there are, um, sequels. “Over in the Garden,” “Somewhere in the Ocean,” and “Way Out in the Desert” are Jennifer Ward’s offerings. (Warning: Poorly designed page. You have to scroll way down to see the books.)

So, as in other cases where Google gives me several different versions, I feel compelled to go through lots of them to build a consensus as to the “real” version. For “Over in the Meadow” I’ve finally settled on what appears to be the original text, but who knows.

And the music… well, that’s gonna be a whole other tale.