Watching late and early;
There I keep my Father's Cows,
There I Milk 'em Yearly:
Booing here, Booing there,
Here a Boo, there a Boo, every where a Boo,
We defy all Care and Strife,
In a Charming Country-Life.
A lot of his plays were political satires which invariably portrayed the monarchy in a good light; d'Urfey obviously knew on which side his bread was buttered. Most of the rest of his work was broad- and rather bawdy- humour (Jonathan Swift, his contemporary, wasn't a fan, referring to his work as "excrement"). It certainly wasn't high-minded; a lot of his Wit and Mirth- which takes up six volumes- would be unrepeatable in polite company; a couple titles of his are The Fart and The Lusty Young Smith, to give you an idea of his writing style. Much of the literary class (like Swift) despised his work, but the public loved his saucy humour; an exasperated Alexander Pope once acknowledged this in a letter: "Dares any Man speak against him who has given so many Men to eat? So may it be said of Mr. Durfey to his Detractors: What? Dares any one despise him, who has made so many Men drink? Alas, Sir! This is a Glory which neither you nor I must ever pretend to." D'urfey recognised this himself, commenting "The Town may damn me for a poet, but they sing my Songs for all that."
So I suppose we should be grateful that Old MacDonald turned out to be so wholesome... it certainly could have gone in another direction entirely. In any case, d'Urfey's bucolic ditty gained wide circulation amongst the public, gradually being modified and sung differently in different regions of the British Isles over the course of a couple hundred years. In the 1880's, it was being sung in Manchester under the name The Farmyard Song; in 1906 it was documented as being sung as Father's Wood I-O. In 1908, folk song archivist Cecil Sharp collected a version of the song in London entitled The Farmyard which starts out:
On a May day morning early;
Feeding of my father's cows
On a May day morning early,
With a moo moo here and a moo moo there,
Here a moo, there a moo, Here a pretty moo.
Six pretty maids come and gang a-long o' me
To the merry green fields of the farm-yard.
There was also a rather odd version kicking around the Ozark region of the States, recorded by a folk song collector in 1922 which went something like this:
And on this mule there were two ears, he-hi-he-hi-ho.
With a flip-flop here and a flip-flop there,
And here a flop and there a flop and everywhere a flip-flop
Old Missouri had a mule, he-hi-he-hi-ho.