Sing a Song of Sixpence

“Sing a Song of Sixpence” is one of those rhymes that almost everyone has heard. The picture it paints — twenty-four blackbirds stuffed into a pie and bursting out when it’s opened — is so strange it just sticks in your head. Kids have laughed at it for centuries. But if you look at the older versions, they’re a bit messy and not nearly as tidy as the one you see in modern nursery books.

Lyrics

Full version:

Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing.
Wasn’t that a dainty dish
To set before the king?

The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money.
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.

The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird
And pecked off her nose.

Later printings sometimes add a fifth verse to soften the blow — the king’s doctor sewing the nose back on, or a small bird swooping in to repair it.

They sent for the king's doctor,
Who sewed it on again.
He sewed it on so neatly,
The seam was never seen.

or:

There was such a commotion,
That little Jenny wren
Flew down into the garden,
And put it back again.

Origins

The rhyme first made it into print in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book around 1744, but with a twist: instead of birds, it had “four and twenty naughty boys” baked in a pie. By the 1780s, the boys had been swapped for blackbirds. A version closer to the one we know today was printed in Gammer Gurton’s Garland (1784), where the maid runs into trouble with a magpie.

Some writers like to push the date back even further. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1602) has Sir Toby Belch calling for a song with the promise of “sixpence.” Beaumont and Fletcher’s play Bonduca (1614) even tosses out the line “sing a song o’ sixpence.” It’s not the rhyme itself, but it shows the words were already floating around long before the nursery version took shape.

Later, in the late 1700s, the critic George Steevens used the rhyme in a jab at Poet Laureate Henry James Pye, and for a while people even joked that he had written it. But the rhyme was already in circulation decades earlier. Steevens was only borrowing something that was already popular.

Meaning

• The most practical one is that it recalls a banquet trick. In Renaissance feasts, cooks sometimes baked live birds into pies so they’d fly out when the crust was cut. There are recipes from the 1500s describing exactly this, and even reports of it happening at royal weddings. Suddenly “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” doesn’t sound so far-fetched.
• Others take on symbolic meanings: the king as the sun, the queen as the moon, and the twenty-four blackbirds as the hours of the day. Some even tried to tie it to Henry VIII, the monks, Catherine of Aragon, and Anne Boleyn. Entertaining, sure, but there’s no real proof.
• And then there was the pirate story — Blackbeard supposedly wrote the rhyme as a code for recruiting crew. That one was flat-out invented in the 1990s by Snopes as a hoax, but it fooled more people than you’d expect.

What we can say is that the earliest version didn’t have blackbirds at all — it had “naughty boys.” With beginnings that shaky, it’s hard to imagine grand allegories hiding in the rhyme. Most likely, it was just a bit of nonsense verse that grew legs, and later readers layered meanings on top of it.

By the 1800s the rhyme was everywhere. Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, and other illustrators all took a turn drawing the king, queen, maid, and pie. Their pictures are part of what cemented the scenes in people’s imaginations.

The sixpence itself gave the rhyme extra resonance. It was a real coin, first minted in 1551 and still in use until 1971 when Britain switched to decimal currency. For more than four centuries, children could picture the coin itself in their hands while chanting the rhyme.

Outside of nursery books, the opening line kept turning up in plays, novels, and even casual speech. “Sing a song of sixpence” became shorthand for money, entertainment, or just the world of old nursery rhymes.

What keeps this one alive is how odd it is. You have a king with his money, a queen with her honey, a maid with her washing — all ordinary domestic scenes — and then a pie explodes with birds and one of them bites off the maid’s nose. The clash between cozy and grotesque is exactly what makes it memorable.

Whether it began as satire, a riddle, or just nonsense verse, Sing a Song of Sixpence has been in print since the 1740s and isn’t going anywhere. The words shift, the verses change, but the picture of that pie has outlasted them all.