This Old Man
This old man, he played one,
He played knick-knack on my thumb,
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give the dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
This old man, he played two,
He played knick-knack on my shoe,
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give the dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
This old man, he played three,
He played knick-knack on my knee,
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give the dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
This old man, he played four,
He played knick-knack on my door,
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give the dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
This old man, he played five,
He played knick-knack on my hive,
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give the dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
This old man, he played six,
He played knick-knack on my sticks,
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give the dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
This old man, he played seven,
He played knick-knack up in heaven,
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give the dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
This old man, he played eight,
He played knick-knack on my gate,
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give the dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
This old man, he played nine,
He played knick-knack on my spine,
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give the dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
This old man, he played ten,
He played knick-knack once again,
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give the dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
Where the rhyme comes from
This Old Man is an English counting song (Roud Folk Song Index number 3550) whose beginnings are genuinely obscure. Its first appearance in print is in English Folk-Songs for Schools, collected by Sabine Baring-Gould and Cecil Sharp and published in 1906 — a version very close to the one children sing today. Like most playground songs it was clearly sung long before anyone thought to write it down, but 1906 is the earliest firm record we have.
An older-looking variant was published later. The folk song collector Anne Gilchrist printed a version called “Jack Jintle” in the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society in 1937, recalling it from her Welsh nurse in the 1870s. The novelist Nicholas Monsarrat, born in 1910, remembered it as “a Liverpool song” that felt “local and original” in his childhood. Collectors gathered it repeatedly across England in the early twentieth century with cheerfully inconsistent words — the old man plays on a thumb or a drum, and the dog is given a bone in almost every telling.
What does it mean?
The honest answer is that the refrain is very likely nonsense — the sort of rhythmic mouth-music that exists to be fun to say. That has not stopped people proposing explanations, and the popular ones deserve to be labelled clearly as theories.
The tinker theory. A widely repeated story says the song describes destitute Irish pedlars in England after the Great Famine of the 1840s: a “paddy” being a slur for an Irishman, a “whack” a blow, and a “knick-knack” the trinkets such men sold door to door, with “rolling home” describing a caravan on the road. It is an evocative reading, and the older sense of “paddywhack” — recorded from at least the early nineteenth century to mean an angry or brawny Irishman — is real. But no evidence connects the song itself to the famine, and folklorists treat the whole story as modern folk etymology rather than history.
The dog-chew theory. More prosaically, a “paddywhack” is also the tough neck ligament of a cow, dried and sold as a chew for dogs. That sits rather neatly beside the line “give the dog a bone”, though again it may be coincidence rather than origin.
The music theory. Others suggest “knick-knack” simply imitates the clacking of bones or spoons played as percussion — a common street entertainment when the song was collected. This is the least colourful explanation and quite possibly the correct one.
Because “paddywhack” can read as an ethnic slur, the song has often been sung as “knick-knack patty-whack” since the 1970s, particularly in the United States. Both versions are in common use; the traditional wording is given above.
Sharing it with children
This is a counting-up song, and its great gift is that every number comes with a place to tap. Sing it slowly and let the child tap the named spot on their own body or around the room — thumb, shoe, knee, door, and so on — holding up the right number of fingers on “he played one”, “he played two”. Matching a number word to a number of fingers and an action is exactly the sort of triple connection that makes counting stick.
Give each child a pair of wooden spoons and let them knock out the “knick-knack” rhythm; the refrain never changes, so even the smallest can join in every verse while the grown-up handles the rhymes. For older children, hide the numbers: sing a verse and let them guess which number is coming from the rhyming word, or challenge them to invent verse eleven and twelve of their own. Ten verses is also a lovely quiet way to count down a long walk home.
Extra verses to sing
These verses aren’t traditional — they’re ours. Sing them when ten isn’t enough.
This old man, he played eleven,
He played knick-knack half past seven,
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give the dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
This old man, he played twelve,
He played knick-knack on the shelf,
With a knick-knack paddywhack,
Give the dog a bone,
This old man went fast asleep.