Lyrics to
Mother Goose

Visit the Jethro Tull Lyrics profile at Decade Lyrics - it has the Mother Goose lyrics as well as the rest of the songs by Jethro Tull.

Here's more interesting things in songs and lyrics tied to Jethro Tull or about the 1970s in general.

As I did walk by Hampstead Fair
I came upon Mother Goose — so I turned her loose —
she was screaming.
And a foreign student said to me —
was it really true there are elephants and lions too
in Piccadilly Circus?

Walked down by the bathing pond
to try and catch some sun.
Saw at least a hundred schoolgirls sobbing
into hankerchiefs as one.
I don’t believe they knew
I was a schoolboy.

And a bearded lady said to me —
if you start your raving and your misbehaving —
you’ll be sorry.
Then the chicken-fancier came to play —
with his long red beard (and his sister’s weird:
she drives a lorry).

Laughed down by the putting green —
I popped `em in their holes.
Four and twenty labourers were labouring —
digging up their gold.
I don’t believe they knew
that I was Long John Silver.

Saw Johnny Scarecrow make his rounds
in his jet-black mac (which he won’t give back) —
stole it from a snow man.

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Jethro Tull has released many songs over the years besides Mother Goose. Jethro Tull released songs from 1968 to 2003 spanning across albums like This Was, Stand Up, Benefit, Aqualung, Living In The Past, Thick As A Brick, A Passion Play, Warchild, Minstrel In The Gallery, Too Old To Rock 'n' Roll: Too Young To Die!, Songs From The Wood, Heavy Horses, Stormwatch, A, The Broadsword And The Beast, Under Wraps, Crest Of A Knave, Rock Island, Catfish Rising, Nightcap, Roots To Branches, J-Tull Dot Com, and The Jethro Tull Christmas Album. Decade Lyrics has over lyrics & songs by Jethro Tull.

About Lyrics and Mother Goose by Jethro Tull

When you decide to study the lyrics to Mother Goose, you're looking at the words, verses and background chorus from the 1971 song by Jethro Tull. Some of the lyrics to Mother Goose have clear meanings and some contain metaphorical references. Like most songs, only Jethro Tull and their collaborators know the full story behind any of the their songs.

You can understand the lyrics to Mother Goose if you take apart the structure of the words. The word "lyric" itself derives from the Latin word lyricus, with the actual English word lyrics applied to the definition "words set to music" listed in Stainer and Barrett's 1876 Dictionary of Musical Terms. Continuing the chain, the Latin word lyricus derives from the Greek word λυρικός or lyrikós. This somewhat means "poetry accompanied by the lyre" or "words set to music." You can easily see that by looking at the background of the word lyric, that the "lyrics to Mother Goose" means the words set to the music of Mother Goose, or poetry accompanied by the lyre played by Jethro Tull. The singular form "lyric" is still used to mean the complete words to a song. However, the singular form lyric is also commonly used to refer to a specific line (or phrase) within a song's lyrics. Hence, by this analysis of word structure, you could say that the lyric to Mother Goose and the lyrics to Mother Goose are both one and the same thing. None of this talk about the word Lyrics is really relevant to fans of Jethro Tull who came here looking just for the lyrics to Mother Goose, but we feel it is still fun to learn what's behind commonly used words and lyrics in songs.

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