Lavender’s Blue
An English song of a king and a queen and a field of lavender, three hundred and fifty years old and still sung to sleep. It is in the Lullabies pack.
The words
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.
Dilly, dilly is the refrain, and the reason children like it. The first verse is the promise, when I am king you shall be queen, and the second sends everyone else out to the fields so the two of them can stay warm. A third verse about being buried under the tap exists in the nursery books. It is not sung here.
Where it comes from
The earliest surviving text is a broadside printed in England between 1672 and 1679, Diddle Diddle, or The Kind Country Lovers, to be sung to a tune already called Lavender Green. Those verses were a drinking song, and not for children. The nursery version arrived in Songs for the Nursery in 1805 and was reprinted through the nineteenth century, by which time the king and queen had become a game for Twelfth Night. In 1948 the song went round the world again with new words in a Walt Disney film, sung by Burl Ives. Those words are still under copyright, and they are not the ones here.
Why it is free to play
The melody and the traditional words are in the public domain. Hele plays the tune as printed in The Everyday Song Book of 1927, melody only. The 1948 film song is a separate work with its own words, and it is not used, so nothing in the app depends on a license. See the packs.
How it sounds in the app
It is arranged for an eighteen-note music-box comb, the same eighteen notes a real movement has, so the tune sits inside the range of the instrument rather than being played on top of it. Your child winds the brass key and lets go, and the lullaby slows as the spring runs down until the last note rings out on its own.
You can turn the key yourself, without installing anything, at hele.toys/try.
Hear it on the comb
This lullaby is in the Lullabies pack: six tunes, bought once and shared with Family Sharing, played on a modeled eighteen-note movement.
Or turn the key first at hele.toys/try