The poem describes a merry king who called for his pipe, bowl, and musicians, with the details varying among versions.

[2] William King mentions two possibilities: the "Prince that Built Colchester" and a 12th-century cloth merchant from Reading named Cole-brook.

Sir Walter Scott thought that "Auld King Coul" was Cumhall, the father of the giant Fyn M'Coule (Finn McCool).

Diana Greenway proposes it came from a lost hagiography of Helena;[12] Antonia Harbus suggests it came instead from oral tradition.

The first four lines of "Old King Cole" are quoted in the song "The Musical Box" by Genesis, on their third album, Nursery Cryme, released in 1971.

In his 1897 collection Mother Goose in Prose, L. Frank Baum included a story explaining the background to the nursery rhyme.

In this version, Cole is a donkey-riding commoner who is selected at random to succeed the King of Whatland when the latter dies without heir.

In P. L. Travers' Mary Poppins Opens the Door, the titular character tells her charges a story about how King Cole remembered that he was a merry old soul.

Walter Lantz produced an Oswald cartoon the same year, The Merry Old Soul, which refers to the nursery rhyme.

In the Fables comic book series, King Cole is depicted as the long-time mayor of Fabletown.

G. K. Chesterton wrote a poem, "Old King Cole: A Parody", which presented the nursery rhyme successively in the styles of several poets: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.