Child Of God: A Song History
"Child Of God," also known as "The Little Cradle Rocks Tonight In Glory," joins a spiritual in which the singer claims to be a child of God to Christmas verses about Mary rocking the cradle of the newborn Christ.[1] The cradle verses appeared in print in 1899, when Emma M. Backus contributed "Christmas Carols from Georgia" to the Journal of American Folk-Lore, presenting them as carols then current among Black singers in Georgia and noting that no tune could be printed with them.[2] Folk Info, which takes its text from Elizabeth Poston's Second Penguin Book of Carols, attributes the melody and first verse to R. Emmet Kennedy's Mellows: A Chronicle of Unknown Singers (1925) and the other verses to Backus's separate collecting.[1] Poston's book was published by Penguin in 1970.[3]
Crib of the Infant Jesus, wood, polychromy, lead, gilded silver and other materials, South Netherlandish, 15th century. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
The Traditional Ballad Index cites the song from a 1964 collection of Peggy Seeger's folk songs and from the Folksinger's Wordbook, which classes it as a Christmas song.[4] The Index's editor doubts that label, writing of the Christmas verses, "They look like they are grafted in."[4] Maureen Sellers includes it, as "Child Of God (The Little Cradle Rocks Tonight In Glory)," in Simply Christmas, a 60-page book of dulcimer tablature with every arrangement in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[5]
Sources
- Folk Info: "The Child of God [Little Cradle Rocks Tonight in Glory]".
- Internet Archive: "The Journal of American Folk-Lore, Volume XII (1899)".
- University of Pennsylvania Libraries: "The Second Penguin Book of Carols".
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Child of God".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Christmas".
- Image: Crib of the Infant Jesus, wood, polychromy, lead, gilded silver and other materials, South Netherlandish, 15th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.