Snippets of memories and music often wander into my head while I'm riding my bike. During a recent outing in Burns Park, I found my brain playing "Three Blind Mice" as I circled around the Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment building on North Shore Drive.

The look on my husband's face when I told him this was indescribable.

That's probably because my mental musical musings tend toward the likes of Nick Drake, Lori McKenna, and Joe Cocker, with intrusions by Def Leppard and The Cult. The nursery rhyme was a new entry in the field:

Three blind mice, three blind mice

See how they run; see how they run

They all ran after the farmer's wife

She cut off their tails with a carving knife

Did you ever see such a sight in your life

As three blind mice?

It took years and a commitment to animal welfare for me to understand this is not a song that ought to be in my repertoire. And it got me to thinking: Where did this seemingly universal poem originate? Is it an example of what music critic Greil Marcus calls "the old weird America"? Nope; Marcus' acclaimed book of the same name is about the so-called "Basement Tapes"--mysterious music made by Bob Dylan and the Band while in seclusion in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1967.

This is much older. Here's an explanation by classical-music.com: "Three Blind Mice" is a tale about a knife-wielding farmer's wife.

Is it really? Probably not.

One theory, according to the website, "holds that they [the mice]........

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