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Arrangement: Ian J. Watts / Mike Wilbury · Singalongasong Band / ClassicRocks
Lyrics
Chirpy fellow, cheerful fellow,
Skipping down the garden green,
Saucy fellow, naughty fellow,
Picking cherries while they're green.
Tweet, tweet, gay and sweet,
Hopping on your nimble feet,
Stay, stay, let us play
In the garden all the day.
Chirpy fellow, cheerful fellow,
Skipping down the garden green,
Saucy fellow, naughty fellow,
Picking cherries while they're green.
Tweet, tweet, gay and sweet,
Hopping on your nimble feet,
Stay, stay, let us play
In the garden all the day.
Tweet, tweet, gay and sweet,
Hopping on your nimble feet,
Stay, stay, let us play
In the garden all the day.
Traditional lyrics — public domain. Arrangement © Singalongasong Band / ClassicRocks.
History & Background
History & Origin
"The Sparrow" is a cheerful children's song that captures the personality of the house sparrow — once one of the most common birds in Britain — in a few well-chosen lines. The sparrow is chirpy, cheerful, saucy, naughty, hopping on nimble feet through a garden and picking at the cherries before they are ripe. It is a portrait of a creature entirely comfortable in the human world, treating the garden as its own.
Sparrows have a long history in British folk song and nursery rhyme, perhaps most famously in "Who Killed Cock Robin," where it is the sparrow who confesses to the killing. Here, however, the sparrow is innocent and lively, a garden companion rather than a villain.
The simple structure of the song — the same verse repeated, with a refrain that invites the sparrow to stay and play — makes it easy for young children to learn and join in. The rock arrangement gives the bird a suitably energetic character, and the "tweet, tweet" of the refrain is hard to resist.
