Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man

"Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man", "Pat-a-cake", "patty-cake" or "pattycake" is one of the oldest and most widely known surviving English nursery rhymes. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 6486.

Lyrics

Common modern versions include:

Origins

The earliest recorded version of the rhyme appears in Thomas D'Urfey's play The Campaigners from 1698, where a nurse says to her charges:

...and pat a cake Bakers man, so I will master as I can, and prick it, and prick it, and prick it, and prick it, and prick it, and throw't into the Oven.

The next appearance is in Mother Goose's Melody, (c. 1765), in the form:

Game

The rhyme is often accompanied by hand-clapping between two people, a clapping game. It alternates between a normal individual clap with two-handed claps with the other person. The hands may be crossed as well. This allows for a possibly complex sequence of clapping that must be coordinated between the two. If told by a parent to a child, the "B" and "baby" in the last two lines are sometimes replaced by the child's first initial and first name.

Pattycake (gorilla)

Pattycake, also known as Patty Cake (September 3, 1972 – March 31, 2013) was a female western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) born to Lulu and Kongo at the Central Park Zoo in New York City. She was the first baby gorilla successfully born in captivity in New York. Months after her much publicized birth, Pattycake's arm was broken when it got stuck in her cage as her mother grabbed her away from her father. The incident was sensationally anthropomorphized in the media as a domestic dispute between Lulu and Kongo, but in reality experts thought it was a simple accident.

Her injury was treated at the Bronx Zoo while a custody dispute between the two zoos broke out in public and elicited a range of opinions from experts who believed Pattycake should be returned to her mother. Intense media coverage and public interest brought Pattycake to the attention of a wide audience, with stories focusing on her recovery, her eventual reunion with her parents, and the conditions of zoo animals in Central Park. An ambitious proposal for renovating the Central Park Zoo arose in the wake of the controversy while the zoo received record attendance rates.