The Frog and mouse, or The frog he would a wooing go

The text on this broadside survived in Britain and North America into modern times. It is the base for many rewrites, folk variants, and parodies, usually using the animal conceit to tell a satirical tale. The tune has migrated also—today it is closer to “Nancy Dawson” (see Peggy Band) than to the late eighteenth-century jig to which the text on Coverly’s broadside was sung.

Norman Cazden traces the history of “The Wedding of the Frog and the Mouse” in detail, citing Henry Belden’s judgment that it is “the most widely known song in the English language,” with its earliest known reference in Wedderburn’s Complaynt of Scotland (1549) (Cazden, Haufrecht, and Studer, Folk Songs 524-33; Roud #16; Opie and Opie 177-81; Mackenzie 373-74). The earliest known English printing of a text on this early fable is in Thomas Ravencroft’s Melismata (1611). Thomas D’Urfey used the storyline in his text “Ditty on a High Amour at St. James’s,” published in Wit and Mirth, and the song was parodied in a number of ballad operas; it appeared in three songsters between 1811 and 1813 (D’Urfey 1:14-16; Moss 343-50; R. Keller, Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources).

During the eighteenth century several tunes were used for “Frog and Mouse” songs. In 1781, Samuel Arnold produced a musical entertainment called The Agreeable Surprise, with lyrics by John O’Keeffe. In this show, Lingo’s “Amo, Amas, I love a lass” was set to a new, simple duple meter tune already circulating as “The Frog and Mouse.” This new tune continued in wide popularity in England and America for the next twenty years as “Amo Amas” and “The Frog and Mouse.” But it was not the tune used with this version of the “Frog and Mouse” tale. The “Amo, Amas” tune was printed with a country dance by Charles and Samuel Thompson and as a nonsense song by G. Smart sometime after 1775 (R. Keller). An incoherent version of that tune with the burden, “with a rigdam bulle mette kimo,” that would eventually go into other versions of the “Frog and Mouse” song, appeared in Chauncey Langdon’s Select Songster (56-59).