I learned the song as “Farmer Brown he had a dog and Bingo was his name-o” so I never had to wrestle with this conundrum.
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
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I learned it as"Old McDonald had a dog and Bingo was his name-o" and now I'm curious about where and how the differences in the song came from
Old McDonald had a farm, e-i e-i o. And on that farm was a cow, e-i e-i o. With a moo-moo here, and a moo-moo there…
That’s the Old McDonald that I grew up with.
I knew it as both. He had a farm and a dog. Little kid me always imagined Bingo living on the farm herding sheep
I’ve never heard that connection before, but it does make sense since McDonald is a farmer, and every farmer I’ve ever met has a dog.
Bingo Brown?
Darn it!!!
Frederic "Bingo" Brown, b. 1923 d. 2002, was a farmer in Northern Tennessee and astute dog lover.
Bingo is the dog.
I always assumed the farmer was Old MacDonald, from the other nursery rhyme about a farmer.
It even fits the rythym if you change some words around in Old MacDonald:
"Old Macdonald had a farm, e i e i o. And on that farm he had a dog name B i n g o."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingo_(folk_song)
Early versions of "Bingo" were also noted as adult drinking songs, as in a version where individual singers were expected to sing a letter from the spelling of the name, and were to take a drink if they failed to do so correctly.[9]
TIL.
It's ambiguous.
Ambiguous?!? You’re just going to go and introduce a third character to the story when we can’t even figure out the first ones name?
Who's on first?
I have honestly never even considered those two lines exist next to eachother and effect eachothers meaning. It has always just been the words associated with the melody.
Yes