Come Up Horsey: A Song History

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In the sources consulted here, "come up horsey" turns up as the refrain of a short lullaby from the American South, which the Traditional Ballad Index lists as "Mamma's Goin' to Buy Him a Little Lap Dog," with "Come Up Horsie" as a second title.[1] In it a mother soothes the child with promises of a little dog and a treat, and the Index compares it with "Hush, Little Baby" for both theme and words.[1] The Index gives the author as unknown and its earliest date as a 1950 field recording, and it also cites a short text and tune printed as "Little Lap Dog" in Byron Arnold's Folk Songs of Alabama.[1]

Painting of a seated woman in a green dress holding a cord, against a dark green wall patterned with large pink flowers

Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle; Augustine-Alix Pellicot Roulin), oil on canvas, 1889. A painting titled for a lullaby, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

That 1950 recording was made by Harold Courlander, whose Alabama sessions took place in the central and western parts of the state in January and February of that year, and he taped Vera Hall Ward singing the lullaby at Tuscaloosa.[2] Folkways issued it in 1951 on the first volume of the set, the one devoted to secular music.[3] Hall, born just outside Livingston in Sumter County, first recorded for John Lomax and the Library of Congress in 1937, and she later sang for Byron Arnold in 1945 and for Courlander in the early 1950s.[4] Alan Lomax recorded her singing it again at her home on October 10, 1959, and the Lomax Digital Archive lists that performance with "Come Up Horsey" as an alternate title.[5]

Ruth Crawford Seeger's 1950 book Animal Folk Songs for Children has a "Little Lap-Dog Lullaby," which Peggy Seeger sang on a 1957 Folkways album of songs chosen from that collection.[6] The album's notes trace that lullaby to Vera Hall's singing in the Lomax collection at the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song.[7] Don Pedi includes "Come Up Horsey," in DGD tuning, in Mountain Dulcimer Mother Goose, a book of children's songs for solo mountain dulcimer and voice that he publishes himself.[8]

Our book that contains the song "Come Up Horsey"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Mamma's Goin' to Buy Him a Little Lap Dog (Come Up Horsie)".
  2. Smithsonian Folkways: Harold Courlander's Alabama field recordings, Vol. 1: Secular, liner notes (FE 4417).
  3. Smithsonian Folkways: Harold Courlander's Alabama field recordings, Vol. 1: Secular, album page (FE 4417).
  4. Encyclopedia of Alabama: "Adele "Vera" Hall".
  5. Association for Cultural Equity, Lomax Digital Archive: "Mama's Gonna Buy You A Little Lap Dog" (Vera Ward Hall, 1959).
  6. Smithsonian Folkways: "Animal Folk Songs for Children" (Peggy Seeger, FC 7551).
  7. Smithsonian Folkways: "Animal Folk Songs for Children" (Peggy Seeger), liner notes.
  8. Don Pedi: "Mountain Dulcimer Mother Goose - Old-Time Songs & Nursery Rhymes For All Ages".
  9. Image: Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle; Augustine-Alix Pellicot Roulin), oil on canvas, 1889. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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