Baa Nanny Black Sheep: A Song History
According to Mainly Norfolk's discography, Dolly Greer's recorded "Baa Nanny Black Sheep" carries Roud number 18267.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index uses that number for a Southern lullaby about a little lamb, which it groups with "All the Pretty Little Horses" while admitting the two forms are hard to separate; its entry does not mention Greer's recording.[2] The Index reports this lullaby family from the Appalachians, the Southeast and the South, gives 1918 and Cecil Sharp's collecting as its earliest date, and lists versions titled "Black Sheep Lullaby" in Vance Randolph's collection and "Black Sheep" in Alan Lomax's Folk Songs of North America.[2]
Nicolaes Berchem, Sheep with Lamb Nursing, etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
The one traditional performance under this exact title found in the sources consulted here comes from Dolly Greer, a distant cousin of the Watson family, who supplied a handful of children's songs, "with some giggles," for sessions that Ralph Rinzler and Daniel Seeger recorded with the Watson and Carlton families.[3] Mainly Norfolk dates her children's-song medley to May 1965 and lists its release in 1977 on The Watson Family Tradition, issued by Topic in Britain and Rounder in the United States and later reissued on CD.[1] Rinzler's notes say these family recordings are held in the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song.[3] Don Pedi's Mountain Dulcimer Mother Goose includes a piece with this title, though the sources consulted here do not say which version he plays or where he learned it.[4]
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