Patty Cake Polka - CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image

The Gordon Colket Music Collection at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville's Lovejoy Library contains 120 pieces of sheet music, mostly dating from the middle of the 19th century. The 90 items included in this digital collection include military songs from the Civil War era, nautical ditties, and romantic ballads. And, of course, more than a few polkas.

There's a polka inspired by the railroad, one called "The Quiet Family Polka," and even "The Lehigh Foot Ball Polka," written about the soccer played at the Bethlehem, PA university. There's also this example, which sets a familiar rhyme to music, and features an impishly waving baby on its cover. The nursrey rhyme "Pat-a-cake" (or "Patty Cake") dates back at least as far at the late 17th century. It is still taught to children more than 300 years later in a modernized form, and back in 1860, it didn't escape the clutches of the dance craze of the day. Unfortunately, this isn't one of the selections in the Colket collection that includes audio, since I'd like to hear how J.H. McNaughton transformed the nursery rhyme into a playful polka. I hope McNaughton kept it up; "Hey Diddle Diddle" seems ripe for a polka transformation (and the cover would probably be a good one as well).

Written by Adam Strohm, Digital Collections Librarian, The Newberry Library

For more information about this and other CARLI Digital Collections, visit http://collections.carli.illinois.edu

To learn more about becoming part of CARLI Digital Collections and using CONTENTdm, see http://www.carli.illinois.edu/products-services/contentdm and http://wiki.carli.illinois.edu/index.php/Portal:CONTENTdm.