Little Boy Blue (poem)

"Little Boy Blue" is a poem by Eugene Field about the death of a child, a sentimental but beloved theme in 19th-century poetry. Contrary to popular belief, the poem is not about the death of Field's son, who died several years after its publication. Field once admitted that the words "Little Boy Blue" occurred to him when he needed a rhyme for the seventh line in the first stanza. The poem first appeared in 1888 in the Chicago weekly literary journal America. Its editor, Slason Thompson, changed the penultimate line ("That they have never seen our Little Boy Blue") to its present form. The poem was republished by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1889 in Field's The Little Book of Western Verse. In 1976, Frank Jacobs wrote a parody of the poem for Mad magazine.

An 1891 song setting of Field's poem by composer Ethelbert Nevin (1862–1901) was made popular by tenor John McCormack. The Welsh-American tenor Evan Williams (1867 - 1918) also recorded this song for Victor Red Seal records. A spoken-word recording (with accompaniment) was also made by Wink Martindale and it appears on his Deck of Cards album.^[1] More recently, the song was covered by American tenor Casey Jones Costello for his 2019 album, Trees and Other Sentimental Songs of Bygone Days.^[2]

In 2019, the Texas-based folk band JamisonPriest released the song "Little Boy Blue" using the lyrics of this poem.^[3]