Nuts in May (rhyme)

"Nuts in May" is a singing game played by children with the aim of pairing a boy and girl from within two teams of participants. It was first recorded in the second half of the 19th century and has a Roud index number of 6308.

For the play, see Nuts in May.
"Nuts in May"
Hawthorn blossom or "knots of may"
Nursery rhyme
Published1894–1898
Songwriter(s)Unknown

The game

Two teams of children face each other in a line and the first team skips forward singing the opening stanza,

Here we come gathering nuts in May,
Nuts in May, nuts in May,
Here we come gathering nuts in May,
On a cold and frosty morning.

They then skip back to their original position and the second team skips towards them repeating a verse in the same form but beginning, “Who will you have for nuts in May?” After the first team has made its choice, they sing “We'll have [name] for nuts in May” and the second team asks next “Who will you send to fetch him/her away?” The first team then sings the final stanza;

We'll send [name] to fetch him/her away,
Fetch him/her away, fetch him/her away,
We'll send [name] to fetch him/her away,
On a cold and frosty morning.

The children chosen then advance to the centre, take hands and try to pull each other towards their own side. The loser has to join the winner's row and the game begins again.[1]

In form the song is close to "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" and shares the same tune and final line.

Origins
The words, rules and tune for "Here we go gathering nuts in May"
Here we are gathering nuts in May; by Elizabeth Adela Forbes

The words and rules of the game were first quoted in the Folk-Lore Record for 1881,[2] followed in 1882 by a similar description among the games for choosing partners in G. F. Northall's English Folk-rhymes.[3] The first of these described the game as played among girls, while Northall says that a girl and a boy are partnered between the participating teams. There are mixed teams also in the description given in Emmeline M. Plunket's Merry Games in Rhyme (London, 1886), which also supplies the music to the words.[4]

Although the rhyme was also known in the U.S. at the same period, it is described as "probably a recent importation from England” in William Wells Newell’s Games and Songs of American Children (New York, 1884).[5] Texts were also recorded later in Canada,[6] among black children in Jamaica,[7] and as being found in New Zealand too.[8]

One of the most comprehensive considerations given the game was by Alice Gomme, who collected variant versions from around Britain in her The Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland (1894-8)[9] and speculated on the origin of the game. What is supposed to be gathered is particularly questionable, since nuts do not mature in the spring. Gomme’s preference for the original wording is "knots (flower posies) of may" blossom (in which she follows Northall's suggestions) and refers the game to former May Day ceremonies, which took place early in the morning. The alternative lines "On a fine summer’s morning" and "So early in the morning", as well as Newell's "On a May morning early", all in place of "On a cold and frosty morning", seem to suggest this.

Robert Herrick’s poem "Corinna’s going a’ Maying", with its references to gathering white-thorn blossom and choosing a marriage partner,[10] describes 17th-century rural customs that might lie at the base of what eventually has become a childhood game. But Gomme pointed out that the pairing that went on then was often less than innocent, a connection hinted at in the more modern drinking song,

I took to gathering nuts in May, nuts in May, nuts in May,
Down by the old mill stream.
But instead of gathering nuts in May,
I put her in a family way,
Down by the old mill stream.[11]
gollark: So it can't directly access the peripherals unless you pass them through, it has to go through the host.
gollark: The CPU has some sort of magicaceous™ features which limit the virtualized thing's access to... memory and IO, I think?
gollark: Also, generally poor type system, *awful* error handling, resistance to abstractiona nd general design which treats the programmer as if they cannot make their own decisions.
gollark: Oh, and channels are a somewhat bad concurrency primitive.
gollark: Also how they have their own assembly language which is like AMD64 but slightly different, uses ALL CAPS to "emphasise that assembly is dangerous" or something, and uses ·s in symbol names for horrible reasons.

See also

The bibliography at the Traditional Ballad Index

References
  1. Susan Brewer, Classic Playground Games: From Hopscotch to Simon Says, Grub Street Publishers, 2009
  2. Evelyn Carrington, "Singing Games", Folk-Lore Record 3.2 (London, 1881), p. 170
  3. English Folk-rhymes, a collection of traditional verses relating to places and persons, customs, superstitions (London, 1882), pp. 385-6
  4. George A. Smathers Libraries, pp. 42-3
  5. Newell, W. W. Games and Songs of American Children ISBN 978-1-145-39322-6 89, archived online
  6. The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 31, 1918: at p. 47 (Ontario, 1909); p. 132 #66 (Toronto, 1898-1911]; p. 178 #6, Ottawa 1917
  7. Martha Warren Beckwith, Folk-games of Jamaica, Vassar College 1922, pp. 49-50
  8. B. Sutton-Smith, "Traditional Games of New Zealand Children", Folklore 64.3 (Sep., 1953) pp.411-423
  9. Gutenberg Files, Vol.1, pp. 424-33
  10. The Oxford Book of English Verse;Poem 248
  11. Mudcat Café
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