Sing a Song of Sixpence

When it comes to nursery thymes, especially very, very, very old nursery thymes, the origins get a bit shrouded in the mists of time, but bits and pieces of the story still peek through. Tom Thumb's Pretty Song Book, published in 1744, is the oldest known book of nursery rhymes. The third rhyme is Sing a Song of Sixpence, but instead of blackbirds, you'll see "naughty boys" baked in the pie. However, the next stanza reads, "When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing..." So are birds a synonym for naughty boys or is it the other way around?

According to people who think about these things, Sing a song of Sixpence probably existed long before 1744. There's a line in Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night (written around 1600) that says, "Come on, there is sixpense for you; let's have a song," so historians know that the sixpence/song connection goes back as least that far. Aficionados of Sing a Song of Sixpence also refer to an Italian cookbook from 1549 that includes a recipe for making pies where live birds would fly out, presumably as a practical joke. Some Sing a Song of Sixpence trivia just isn't true. There rumor that the song was really a coded message written by the feared pirate, Blackbeard, to recruit sailors on voyages of pillage and plunder is nothing more than more. You just can't trust everything you read or sing.