Old MacDonald Had a Farm

by Thomas d'Urfey for an opera in 1706, before existing as a folk song in Britain, Ireland and North America for hundreds of years in various forms then finally being standardised in the twentieth century.

is "In the Fields in Frost and Snow" from a 1706 opera called The Kingdom of the Birds or Wonders of the Sun written by the English writer and composer Thomas d'Urfey.

It also appeared on song sheets for decades, so it was presumably popular among ordinary English people in the eighteenth century whether it originated from the opera or not.

[2] Several versions were collected in England in around the turn of the twentieth century by folklorists, such as one called "The Farmyard Song" taken from a John Lloyd of Manchester in the 1880s by Anne Gilchrist, and another called "Father's Wood I O" collected in 1906 in Scotter, Lincolnshire by Percy Grainger; both of the original transcriptions of these versions are available via the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website.

Frederick Thomas Nettleingham's 1917 book Tommy's Tunes, a collection of World War I era songs,[6] includes a variant of the song called "Ohio" which lists nine species: horses (neigh-neigh), dogs (bow-wow/woof woof/ruff ruff), chickens(hen=cluck cluck/chicks=chick chick), ducks (quack quack), goose (Honk Honk), cows (moo moo), pigs (grunt grunt), cats (meow meow), sheep/goat (baa baa) and a donkey/mule (hee-haw).

It is unknown what the traditional source of these iconic elements was, but the American versions seem most similar, with their E-I-E-I-O refrains and "old" farmers mentioned in the first line.