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16-473: "Roses Are Red" is the name of a love poem and children's rhyme with Roud Folk Song Index number 19798. It has become a cliché for Valentine's Day , and has spawned multiple humorous and parodic variants. A modern standard version is: Roses are red   Violets are blue, Sugar is sweet   And so are you. The rhyme builds on poetic conventions that are traceable as far back as Edmund Spenser 's epic The Faerie Queene of 1590: It

32-505: A folksong collection made by Helmut Schaffrath and now incorporating Classical themes, themes from a number of Baroque composers, and Renaissance themes. It is proposed to include Indigenous American songs, as transcribed around the years 1900 to 1920 by Natalie Curtis . The Folk Song Index is a collaborative project between the Oberlin College Library and the folk music journal Sing Out! . It indexes traditional folk songs of

48-514: A number to each song, including all variants (now known as the "Roud number") to overcome the problem of songs in which even the titles were not consistent across versions. The system initially used 3x5-inch filing cards in shoeboxes. In 1993, Roud implemented his record system on a computer database , which he continues to expand and maintain and which is now hosted on the website of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library . In

64-704: A particular song. Comprehensive details of those songs are then available, including details of the original collected source, and a reference to where to find the text (and possibly music) of the song within a published volume in the EFDSS archive. A related index, the Roud Broadside Index, includes references to songs which appeared on broadsides and other cheap print publications, up to about 1920. In addition, there are many entries for music hall songs, pre- World War II radio performers' song folios, sheet music, etc. The index may be searched by title, first line etc. and

80-418: Is a similar index of almost 218,000 Latvian folksong texts, created by Latvian scholar Krišjānis Barons at the end 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. The Essen folk song database is another collection that includes songs from non-English-speaking countries, particularly Germany and China. It is a collaboration between groups at Stanford University and Ohio State University , stemming from

96-607: Is red, the violet's blue, The honey 's sweet, and so are you. Thou are my love and I am thine; I drew thee to my Valentine: The lot was cast and then I drew, And Fortune said it shou'd be you. Victor Hugo was probably familiar with Spenser, but may not have known the English nursery rhyme when he published his novel Les Misérables in 1862. A song by the character Fantine contains this refrain: Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses, Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours. In his English translation published in

112-600: The 1950s. The index was compiled and is maintained by Steve Roud , formerly the Local Studies Librarian in the London Borough of Croydon . He was also Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society . He began it in around 1970 as a personal project, listing the source singer (if known), their locality, the date of noting the song, the publisher (book or recorded source), plus other fields, and crucially assigning

128-517: The Roud Folk Song Index is as a research aid correlating versions of traditional English-language folk song lyrics independently documented over past centuries by many different collectors across (especially) the UK and North America. It is possible by searching the database—for example by title, first line(s), or subject matter (or a combination of any of a dozen fields)—to locate many of the variants of

144-553: The online version of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library in 2006. The purpose of the index is to give each song a unique identifier . The numbers were assigned on a more or less arbitrary basis, and are not intended to carry any significance in themselves. However, because of the practicalities of compiling the index (building on previously published sources) it is true as a general rule that older and better-known songs tend to occupy low numbers, while songs which are obscure have higher numbers. Closely related songs are grouped under

160-505: The past few years, the numbers have been widely accepted in academic circles. James Madison Carpenter 's collection has 6,200 transcriptions and 1,000 recorded cylinders made between 1927 and 1955. The index gives the title, first line and the name of the source singer. When appropriate, the Child number is given. It is still a largely unexploited resource, with none of the recordings easily available. The Cabinet of Folksongs ( Dainu skapis )

176-530: The poem in a verse of his 1964 hit " Dang Me ": They say roses are red and violets are purple Sugar's sweet and so is maple syruple . [ sic ] The Marx Brothers ' film Horse Feathers has Chico Marx describing the symptoms of cirrhosis thus: Cirrhosis are red, so violets are blue, so sugar is sweet, so so are you. The Benny Hill version: Roses are reddish Violets are bluish If it weren't for Christmas We'd all be Jewish. Roud Folk Song Index The primary function of

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192-447: The result includes details of the original imprint and where a copy may be located. The Roud number – "Roud num" – field may be used as a cross-reference to the Roud Folk Song Index itself in order to establish the traditional origin of the work. The database is recognised as a "significant index" by the EFDSS and was one of the first items to be published on its web site after the launch of

208-553: The same Roud number. If a trusted authority gives the name of a song but not the words, it is assigned Roud number 000. The Index cross-references to the Child Ballad number, if one is available for the particular song in question. It also includes, where appropriate, the Laws number , a reference to a system of classification of folk songs, using one letter of the alphabet and up to two numeric digits, developed by George Malcolm Laws in

224-629: The same year, Charles Edwin Wilbour rendered this as: Violets are blue, roses are red, Violets are blue, I love my loves. This translation replaces the original version's cornflowers (" bleuets ") with violets, and makes the roses red rather than pink, effectively making the song closer to the English nursery rhyme. The short poem has since become a snowclone , and numerous satirical versions have long circulated in children's lore. Among them: Roses are red. Violets are blue. Onions stink. And so do you. Country music singer Roger Miller parodied

240-469: The world, with an emphasis on English-language songs, and contains over 62,000 entries and over 2,400 anthologies. Max Hunter's collection lists 1,600 songs, but each minor variant is given a distinct number. The Traditional Ballad Index at the California State University at Fresno includes Roud numbers up to number 5,000 with comments on the songs, but draws on fewer sources. (For example,

256-574: Was upon a Sommers shynie day, When Titan faire his beames did display, In a fresh fountaine, farre from all mens vew, She bath'd her brest, the boyling heat t'allay; She bath'd with roses red, and violets blue, And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew. A rhyme similar to the modern standard version can be found in Gammer Gurton's Garland , a 1784 collection of English nursery rhymes published in London by Joseph Johnson : The rose

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