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Cuckoo, Cuckoo, What Do You Do?

[ Roud 19967 ; Mudcat 44060 ; trad.]

According to Wikipedia, the poet Jane Taylor (1783-1824) is usually given as the author of the children’s rhyme Cuckoo, Cuckoo, What Do You Do?, but the 1879 issue of the journal The Folk-Lore Record cites William Howitt’s The Book of the Seasons as the source, who in turn published the poem without giving any source.

Lady Maisery and Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith sang The Cuckoo, as set to music by Benjamin Britten in Friday Afternoons (op. 7) in 1933-35, on their May 2026 album Wakefire. Their introduction text quotes Thomas Furly Forster from The Pocket Encyclopedia of Natural Phenomena (1827):

The Cuckoo begins early in the vernal season, with the interval of a minor third; the bird then proceeds to a major third, next to a fourth, then a fifth, after which his voice breaks out without attaining a minor sixth. An old Norfolk proverb says:

Lyrics

Lady Maisery sing The Cuckoo

What do you do?
In April I open my bill
In May I sing night and day
In June I change my tune
July far far I fly
In August away I must

Cuckoo, Cuckoo in James Orchard Halliwell: The Nursery Rhymes of England (1886), DXXI.

Cuckoo, Cuckoo,
What do you do?
In April
I open my bill;
In May
I sing night and day;
In June
I change my tune;
In July
Away I fly;
In August
Away I must.