A children’s song and nursery rhyme about a farmer named MacDonald and the various animals he keeps on his farm. Each verse of the song changes the name of the animal and its respective noise. In many versions, the song is cumulative, with the noises from all the earlier verses added to each subsequent verse. It appears to date from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century with several different variants and has subsequently been translated and adapted into many different languages including Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Hebrew, Japanese, and Korean.

See a list of other potential traditional song themes here.

Videos:
David Briggs – Prelude, Adagio and Variations on ‘Old MacDonald had a farm’ – Gloucester cathedral, Part I
David Briggs – Prelude, Adagio and Variations on ‘Old MacDonald had a farm’ – Gloucester cathedral, Part II
David Briggs – Prelude, Adagio and Variations on ‘Old MacDonald had a farm’ – Gloucester cathedral, Part III