When I was growing up in the 1950s, most of the time I didn't know that there was more than one version of a particular chilren's rhyme. I thought the version that I knew was the ONLY version.

If I happened to hear another version of a rhyme I knew, I thought that MY version was the REAL version. What I meant by "real" was that my version was the CORRECT version. And what I meant by that is that I thought that there's only ONE correct version of a particular rhyme.

Maybe it's different for songs. Maybe there can only be one correct version of a song-the version that someone wrote.

But because children's rhymes are created anonymously and passed along largely through oral tradition there probably have always been multiple versions of the same rhyme.

Thanks to the Internet and other print & recorded resources, children, youth, and adults can become aware that there are different versions of the "text" and often different performance instructions of the samer rhyme.

Thanks to Internet threads such as this one, people nowadays can "see" that a particular rhyme may change over time, and may be different at the same time within different nations, cities, and even neighborhoods of the same city.

And all these versions are REAL for the people who recite them.