Newflash! Lullaby scandal.

A few months ago, I realized that the ABC song and Twinkle Twinkle share the same melody and I thought it was crazy that I never realized that.

But WAIT – there’s more!  Tonight I was singing random songs in the car to Jenson and started singing Ba Ba Black Sheep, and when I got part way through, I stopped because I realized that this ALSO was the same melody!  I was singing parts of each song to make sure it fit – like:

“Abcd
have you any wool
how i wonder what you are
qrstuv
like a diamond in the sky..”

And then I got confused on which part of which song should go next.  Plus, embarrassingly enough, there are a few letters in the alphabet that I can’t just pick up and say in order.  Yeah…just a couple between F and K.

While I’m talking about “ba, ba black sheep” and embarrassing things, when Jenson was really young I was trying to sing that song, but I couldn’t remember how that part that goes:

“One for my master and one for my dame
And one for the little boy who lives down the lane”

All that I could come up with was “one for the master and one for the slave”…and I KNEW that it couldn’t be right.  Sure it was a different time back in the 1700’s when this was written, but still.  I felt bad that I even thought that those words could be possible – I’ll blame it on baby brain.  As it turns out, a quick search on wiki shows that the song has long been controversial because some say that it alludes to the slave trade and such.  Also, Australian kindergarten teachers changed the lyrics this year from “black” to other colors.

This post was meant to be a 2 line revelation about the melody. True to form…I’m often a person of few spoken words (unless I had a couple of drinks), but of MANY written words.