Good Night To You All: A Song History
"Good Night to You All" is a short round wishing its hearers restful sleep in the care of guardian angels and ending in a string of farewells; a twenty-first edition of The Golden Book of Favorite Songs, a Chicago songbook from Hall & McCreary bearing copyright dates of 1915, 1923 and 1946, prints its words and tune on one page under the heading "Good Night (Round)" with no author or composer named.[1] The online songbook index SingPraises.net credits both words and tune to a "German folk song," though the sources consulted here identify no German original.[2]
Arthur Rackham, The Parrot and the Cat (Sketch for "Good-Night" by Eleanor Gates), black ink wash with graphite on paper, c. 1905. A sketch for a children's book called Good-Night, chosen for its title; it has no connection to the round.
That index records about twenty appearances in print between 1923 and 1971, beginning with a 1923 edition of the Golden Book and including the Gray Book of Favorite Songs (1924), Twice 55 Community Songs for Male Voices (1926), Latter-day Saint songbooks from 1928 to 1970, and school music readers of 1959 and 1971, several of which title it a round.[2]
Judy House includes it in the lesson on rounds in Beginning Lessons For The Mountain Dulcimer, a 112-page book covering a beginner's first 14 lessons, with every song in DAD tuning and MP3 recordings of the songs and exercises at two tempos.[3]
Sources
- Internet Archive: "The Golden Book of Favorite Songs" (Hall & McCreary, Chicago, 21st edition).
- SingPraises.net: "Goodnight to You All (English)".
- Judy House: "Beginning Lessons For The Mountain Dulcimer".
- Image: Arthur Rackham, The Parrot and the Cat (Sketch for "Good-Night" by Eleanor Gates), black ink wash with graphite on paper, c. 1905. The Cleveland Museum of Art.