Hey, Ho, Nobody Home

Three lines long, and already in print in 1609. "Hey, Ho, Nobody Home" appears in Pammelia, the first collection of rounds and catches ever published in England, which makes it one of the oldest songs children still learn by heart. The words belong to someone standing outside a house in winter with nothing at all: no food, no drink, no money, and no answer at the door. The tune is cheerful anyway.

Almost nobody sings it alone. It is built as a round, so a second group starts at the top while the first group is partway through, and the three short lines stack up into harmony. That is exactly how it was designed to work four centuries ago, and it is why choirs and school music classes still reach for it as a warm-up.

Origins

Thomas Ravenscroft published Pammelia in London in 1609. He was very young at the time, probably around twenty, and the book was the first of its kind in English: 100 anonymous pieces for three to ten voices, collected from what people were already singing in streets, taverns and houses rather than written for the court. Ravenscroft brought out a companion volume the same year, Deuteromelia, which holds the first known printing of Three Blind Mice, and a third collection, Melismata, in 1611. Between them those books preserve a large part of what we know about ordinary English singing before the Civil War.

Everything in Pammelia is anonymous, so no author has ever been attached to "Hey, Ho, Nobody Home". Nor is there any way of telling how long it had been passed around before Ravenscroft wrote it down. Printed songbooks of that period tended to catch songs that had lived for years in memory alone, so 1609 marks the date the song reached paper rather than the date it began.

The song has drifted between traditions since. It turns up in Christmas and winter collections, in camp and scouting songbooks, and in the folk revival repertoire of the twentieth century, when singers went back to early printed sources like Ravenscroft for material. Modern versions often repeat the opening line at the end, giving four lines instead of three, and the round is sung in three or four parts depending on the arrangement.

Meaning & Interpretation

The plain reading is a knock at a door that nobody answers. "Meat" in the English of 1609 meant food of any kind, not just flesh, so the middle line is a complete inventory of what the singer does not have. The last line refuses to be miserable about it.

The setting is usually taken to be midwinter, and the words fit the old custom of going house to house at that season asking for food, drink or a coin in exchange for a song. Wassailing worked on the same bargain, and so do the door to door verses behind many carols. Read that way, the song is sung by someone whose luck has run out on a night when the whole point was that doors would open. Whether that was the original intention or a meaning it collected later cannot be settled from the source, since Ravenscroft printed the words with no explanation at all.

What is a round?

A round is a song for several groups of singers where every group sings the same melody, but each one starts a set number of beats or bars after the group before it. The overlapping parts are written so that they fit together as harmony no matter which point each group has reached. Row, Row, Row Your Boat is the round most children learn first. "Hey, Ho, Nobody Home" works the same way and is usually sung in three or four parts.

How old is Hey, Ho, Nobody Home?

It is at least 400 years old. Thomas Ravenscroft printed it in Pammelia in 1609, during the reign of James I and while Shakespeare was still writing, and it was almost certainly being sung for some time before that. It is one of the oldest English songs still in common use with children.

What does "meat nor drink nor money have I none" mean?

It means the singer has no food, nothing to drink and no money. Meat carried its older, wider sense of food in general, which survives in words like sweetmeat. The stacked negatives ("nor... nor... none") were ordinary grammar in 1609 and were used for emphasis rather than by mistake.