As the everyday term for the male domestic fowl, “cock” has been good English since the ninth century.  It seems to have taken another six or seven hundred years for it to have developed its phallic sense. Ribald songs in a music-hall style that comically exploit the equivocal meaning of the word are known from the 1830s, but the wordplay itself must be centuries old.  (The famous fifteenth-century poem, “I have a gentle cock,” can easily be read metaphorically, for what would an actual rooster be doing in “my lady’s chamber”?)

The present song (more often called “Cock-a-doodle-doo”) is usually set in London and has been collected from older singers in England, Scotland, and Ireland. It is first reported from the 1940s, but the actual period of its composition is not known. The song’s lyrical and melodic style suggests it was written in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

Notes by Jon Lighter