One of the nursery rhyme songs on "Tell It Again"
has got its own Mudcat thread. I'm terrible at
making links within one Mudcat thread to a different Mudcat thread.
I blow it every time.

The thread is threadid=61122
and it is titled
Lyr Add: Baby Bye, here's a Fly (Theodore Tilton)

"Tell It Again" places this poem/song in its suite/subgroup
"The Animal World", four songs in.
The music, to be redundant, is by Moondog;
Theodore Tilton's poem was collected by Julie Laurence.

Ms. Laurence's source must not have been Tilton's original
since she uses only part of the poem -- the first of its eight stanzas --
and changes the word order;
this is probably because Tilton's little poem was very popular in the
second half of the 1800's, when it was published first,
and excerpts of the poem, with minor variations,
appeared in countless anthologies.
The Mudcat lyric thread gives the original as Tilton wrote it.

"The Animal World," on "Tell It Again," goes like this:

Baby bye,
Here's a fly,
Let us watch him, you and I.
How he crawls
Up the walls,
Yet he never falls.
There he goes
On his toes,
Tickling baby's nose.
If you and I had two such legs,
You and I could walk on eggs.


The words, first published in 1867, must be public domain.
The music, with copyrights,
is part of the estate of Moondog / Louis Hardin Jr.,
administered by Managarm Musik-Verlag in Germany.