Mary and her musical lamb
Reinventing Mary Had a Little Lamb: how to be creative by changing something but not everything
Hello,
Here’s a story for you.
One day, a little lamb (with fleece as white as snow) follows a little girl to school. And… that’s it!
The nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb might be simple, but the story behind it is a bit more complicated. There’s no question that the Mary in the story is Mary Sawyer, who found an abandoned lamb on her family’s farm in Massachusetts and nursed it back to life. It grew very attached to Mary …
‘and everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go’.
But there’s a bit of controversy when it comes to who actually wrote the nursery rhyme. Was it John Roulstone, a young man from Harvard, who saw the lamb following Mary in 1815? Or was it Sarah Josepha Hale, who included it in her book Poems for Children in 1830?
We’ll never know the truth of it, (and if you’d like to read more on the mystery, go here and here).
Are you up for a bit of reinvention? How to be creative with Mary and her little lamb.
A great and low risk way to get started with being creative is to take something you already know and change one thing. You can experiment without the pressure of creating something from scratch, and you can do it as many times as you want.
I think this applies to everything we do and not just music. But music is a great way to show how it can work.
So that’s what I’m going to do with Mary Had a Little Lamb. I’m going to keep the melody the same but change the context in which I sing it.
Of course it will still be recognisable because our brains are wired to recognise patterns, and a melody is a pattern of notes. When we hear something familiar, our ‘ears’ latch onto the sequence of notes no matter how things around it might be different. For more on patterns in music, go to Maths and Music: Patterns in Play.
Let’s get down to it. Here’s a video with me playing it three different ways:
And now it’s your turn
Here’s the same jazzy backing I play in the video. I play the music two times. The first time I sing, and the second time (which comes in straight away so be ready), I’ve left for you to try.
If you feel like it, you can also try different ways of singing it, or even get rid of the words and try some scat singing, like I do at the end of my verse in the video (and for more on scat singing, go to Doo Bee Doo Bee Doo).
Go for it!
Let me know if you enjoyed this post! And let me know if there's anything you're curious about or would like me to explore further. You can comment on this post or send me a message at katepainediscoveringmusic@substack.com ❤️