Lavender’s Blue
Traditional
- Takes about:
- 1 minutes to sing
- Tune:
- The traditional English tune
Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly, lavender’s green, When I am king, dilly dilly, you shall be queen: Who told you so, dilly dilly, who told you so? ’Twas mine own heart, dilly dilly, that told me so.
Call up your men, dilly dilly, set them to work, Some with a rake, dilly dilly, some with a fork; Some to make hay, dilly dilly, some to thresh corn, Whilst you and I, dilly dilly, keep ourselves warm.
Where it comes from
“Lavender’s Blue” started life as a grown-up love song. Around 1675 a printed ballad called “Diddle, Diddle, or, The Kind Country Lovers” was sold in London, to be sung “to the tune of Lavender green”. You can see it in the English Broadside Ballad Archive. Over time it became a nursery song.
These words come from James Orchard Halliwell’s Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales of 1849. He prints a third verse too, but it’s a joke about being buried under a beer barrel, so we’ve left it out.
It’s not the same song as “Lavender Blue (Dilly Dilly)” from the 1948 Disney film So Dear to My Heart. That one has different words and its own tune.
Old words
- dilly dilly: just a fun sound, with no meaning. Older versions say “diddle diddle”.
- ’Twas mine own heart: it was my own heart.
- thresh corn: beat the grain to shake the seeds out. In Britain, “corn” meant wheat or barley.
- whilst: while.
How to sing it
- It has a swaying rhythm, lovely for dancing slowly round the room with a baby in your arms.
- Toddlers can join in on every “dilly dilly”.
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