Did You Ever See a Lassie?
nursery rhyme
"Did You Ever See a Lassie?" is a traditional Scottish folk song with a Roud Folk Song Index number of 5040.
Lyrics
Modern versions of the lyrics include:
Did you ever see a lassie,
A lassie, a lassie?
Did you ever see a lassie
Go this way and that?
Go this way and that way,
Go this way and that way.
Did you ever see a lassie
Go this way and that?
Did you ever see a laddie,
A laddie, a laddie?
Did you ever see a laddie
Go this way and that?
Go this way and that way,
Go this way and that way.
Did you ever see a laddie
Go this way and that?
Origins
The terms "lassie" and "laddie" have led several authors to place this song's origins in Scotland (see "references" section), but it was first collected in the United States in the last decade of the nineteenth century and was not found in Great Britain until the mid-twentieth century.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Did You Ever See a Lassie?” is nursery rhyme. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Ever, Lassie and nursery, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “nursery rhyme” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5274049. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Did You Ever See a Lassie?” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.