“A pint nor a quart won't I grieve me!”
Jolly Sixpence
When Bill Price and myself used to sing together in the 1970s, we would perform several duets, mainly chorus songs such as the ‘Cropper Lads’, 'Three Jolly Boys' and the 'Bonny Hawthorn'. We always treated our version of this old children’s nursery song as though it was a humorous drinking song, slowly feigning being more intoxicated with each verse.
There are many different versions of the song and all of them feature a ‘Jolly’ coin, usually a Shilling or Sixpence and in all the verses the money carried home decreases by Twopence.
J.O. Halliwell’s, The Nursery Rhymes of England, 1846, has a version with the first line as. "I love sixpence, a pretty little sixpence". Peter W. Graham’s Don Juan and Regency England states that the song ‘I have a little sixpence’ was a popular song from the play ‘Don Giovanni’ in London in 1817.
