Ain't That Rocking All Night: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

The earliest printing of this African American spiritual found in the sources consulted here is in Saint Helena Island Spirituals (1925), where it appears as no. 3, "Mary had de leetle baby," in a four-part harmonization.[1] The title page credits Nicholas George Julius Ballanta-Taylor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, with recording and transcribing the songs at the Penn Normal, Industrial and Agricultural School on St. Helena Island, South Carolina.[1] The book's introduction says he took down spirituals from the singing of the school's pupils, its Community Class and the St. Helena Quartet, and that the 103 he gathered were believed to be previously unpublished versions.[1]

Painting of a seated woman in a green jacket holding a cord in her lap, against wallpaper of pink flowers

Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle; Augustine-Alix Pellicot Roulin, 1851–1930), oil on canvas, 1889. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject, a mother rocking a cradle; it has no connection to the song.

Ruth Crawford Seeger included the song in American Folk Songs for Christmas, published by Doubleday in 1953.[2][3] A 1957 Folkways album of the same title, on which her daughters Peggy, Barbara and Penny Seeger sing songs selected from the book, includes it as "Ain't That Rockin' All Night."[2][4] The album's notes give St. Helena Island, South Carolina, as the song's source and cross-refer to a note credited to Ballanta-Taylor's collection.[2]

In 2013 Elizabeth Mitchell recorded it with piano, flute and strings for The Sounding Joy, a Smithsonian Folkways album built around Seeger's 1953 songbook.[5][6] The album's notes count it among the performers' favorite Seeger arrangements and call it the "most haunting song in all of her songbooks."[6]

Find books with Ain't That Rocking All Night for sale →

Sources

  1. Internet Archive: "Saint Helena Island Spirituals" (N. G. J. Ballanta-Taylor, 1925).
  2. Smithsonian Folkways: "American Folk Songs for Christmas" (FW 7553) liner notes.
  3. Ilsley Public Library catalog: "American Folk Songs for Christmas" (Ruth Crawford Seeger, Doubleday, 1953).
  4. Smithsonian Folkways: "American Folk Songs for Christmas" (The Seeger Sisters).
  5. Smithsonian Folkways: "The Sounding Joy: Christmas Songs In and Out of the Ruth Crawford Seeger Songbook".
  6. Smithsonian Folkways: "The Sounding Joy" (SFW 45074) liner notes.