Alphabe Thursday … N is for Nursery Rhymes

In the UK , America and anywhere the English language is spoken, children enjoy listening to the same traditional verses. This has changed over the last decades, but certainly I was immersed in nursery rhymes at least until late 1950s and the early 1960s when popular music became ‘heard’ on the radio and the BBC.

In the New World and indeed the old a child’s first ‘poems’ or poetic memories were Mary, Mary quite contrary, Humpty Dumpty and Old King Cole etc.
The only difference was that in England these songs were called Nursery Rhymes and in America they were called Mother Goose Songs.
The term ‘nursery rhymes seems to have come on to use about 1824; until then they had been called ‘songs’ or ‘ditties’ and earlier in the 18th century usually as Tom Thumb’s’ songs or Mother Goose’s’ the name retained in America.   

gvngn

Further reading The Oxford dictionary of nursery rhymes edited by Iona and Peter Opie