Green Grow the Rushes, O

"Green Grow the Rushes, O" (alternatively "Ho" or "Oh") (also known as "The Twelve Prophets", "The Carol of the Twelve Numbers", "The Teaching Song", "The Dilly Song", or "The Ten Commandments"), is an English folk song (Roud #133). It is sometimes sung as a Christmas carol. It often takes the form of antiphon, where one voice calls and is answered by a chorus.

The song is not to be confused with Robert Burns's similarly titled "Green Grow the Rashes".

It is cumulative in structure, with each verse built up from the previous one by appending a new stanza. The first verse is:

I'll sing you one, O

Green grow the rushes, O

What is your one, O?

One is one and all alone

And evermore shall be so.

There are many variants of the song, collected by musicologists including Sabine Baring-Gould and Cecil Sharp from the West of England at the start of the twentieth century. The stanzas are clearly much corrupted and often obscure, but the references are generally agreed to be both Biblical and astronomical.