Sing! Sing! What Shall I Sing? - English Children's Songs - England - Mama Lisa's World: Children's Songs and Rhymes from Around the World - Intro Image

Notes

Here's a longer version from The Real Mother Goose (1916):

Sing, sing, what shall I sing?
Cat's run away with the pudding-string!
Do, do, what shall I do?
The cat has bitten it quite in two.

Francie wrote: "I'm 77, and remember my dad in South Shields I in the 1950s singing a version of an older rhyme I've just seen on your site-

'Sing Sing, what'll I sing
The cat's run away with the puddin'-cloth string
Where, where under the chair
Sellin' black puddins three ha'pence a pair."

Sing! Sing! What Shall I Sing? - English Children's Songs - England - Mama Lisa's World: Children's Songs and Rhymes from Around the World 1

Thanks and Acknowledgements

The rhyme at the top of the page can be found in The Only True Mother Goose Melodies (c. 1843) and Harry's Ladder to Learning (1850). The illustration can be found in The Real Mother Goose (1916), illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright. The last illustration is from The Only True Mother Goose Melodies (published and copyrighted in Boston in 1833 by Munroe & Francis).

Thanks to Francie for sharing her dad's version of the rhyme.