All The Pretty Little Horses: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"All the Pretty Little Horses" is a Southern lullaby in which a baby is promised horses when it wakes. The Traditional Ballad Index reports it from the Appalachian, southeastern and southern United States, gives 1918 and Cecil Sharp's collecting as its earliest date, and points out that a darker verse about a baby or lamb left in a meadow sometimes travels with the horses and sometimes stands alone as a separate song.[1] In On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (1925), Dorothy Scarborough gathered several versions and treated them as variants of a single lullaby heard throughout the South, its tune and mood holding steady from one telling to the next. Most came from correspondents who credited Black nurses or other Black singers; her sister, for one, had picked it up as a child from Black singers in Grimes County, Texas, and later used it to put her own babies to sleep.[2]

Hand-colored lithograph of a chestnut mare standing with her foal beside a thatched barn

Victor Adam, Mare and Foal, hand-colored lithograph, 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its horses; it has no connection to the lullaby.

Scarborough opened her lullaby chapter with a general argument rather than evidence about this particular song. Writing fondly of the Black nurses of plantation households, she suggested that because slavery could part mother and child by sale, an enslaved nurse often gave the white children in her care more affection than her own, or at least appeared to, and she ranked lullabies among the most characteristic Black folk songs.[2] That is her interpretation, not a documented origin; in the sources consulted here, no one establishes who first sang the song or when. Brandeis University's Feminist Sexual Ethics Project offers another angle: among songs from the narratives of formerly enslaved people, it prints three versions of "Go to Sleepy," noting that the song appears in white tradition as "All the Pretty Little Horses." One is credited to Annie Little, born into slavery in Missouri in 1856 and raised on a Mississippi plantation, who sang it to all ten of her own children; the compilers call it a "haunting song of comfort and abandonment."[3]

John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax printed it as "All the Pretty Little Horses" in American Ballads and Folk Songs,[1] published by Macmillan in 1934.[4] Among the songs John A. Lomax and Ruby T. Lomax recorded for the Library of Congress in 1939 were "Pretty Little Ponies," from John Lowry Goree in Houston on 12 April,[5] and "Go to Sleepy," from Frances and Caroline Horne near Livingston, Alabama, on 28 May.[6] Pete Seeger recorded it for Lullabies and Rounds around 1946 and again for Folkways' Songs to Grow On series in 1951.[7] A version also appears in Singing Family of the Cumberlands,[1] the 1955 book by the Kentucky singer Jean Ritchie, whose songs and lap dulcimer playing Alan Lomax had recorded for the Library of Congress.[8]

Find books with All The Pretty Little Horses for sale →

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "All the Pretty Little Horses".
  2. Internet Archive: Dorothy Scarborough, "On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs" (Harvard University Press, 1925), chapter VI, "Lullabies".
  3. Brandeis University, Feminist Sexual Ethics Project: "Slave Lullabies".
  4. Internet Archive: John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, "American Ballads and Folk Songs" (New York: Macmillan, 1934), catalogue record.
  5. Library of Congress: "Pretty Little Ponies" (John Lowry Goree, Houston, Texas, 1939; AFS 02728a04).
  6. Library of Congress: "Go to Sleepy" (Frances Horne and Caroline Horne, Livingston, Alabama, 1939; AFS 02692a02).
  7. Smithsonian Folkways: "Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection" (SFW 40225), liner notes by Jeff Place.
  8. National Endowment for the Arts: "Jean Ritchie" (2002 National Heritage Fellow).