Rock A Bye Baby: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

The words of "Rock-a-bye Baby" first reached print in Mother Goose's Melody, which John Newbery published in London around 1765, and later reprints came out mainly around Boston, according to the Library of Congress Music Division.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index, citing Iona and Peter Opie, puts the earliest date for the text at 1784 and Gammar Gurton's Garland, though its own notes also mention the printing of about 1765.[2] Nobody knows who wrote the rhyme.[1] The Ballad Index lists traditional versions from the American Southeast and South, Ireland, Scotland and the Canadian Maritimes, some with extra verses, among them one in which a farmer goes out hunting to get food for the baby, and it files the song as Roud 2768.[2] The same index dismisses Katherine Elwes Thomas's theory tying the rhyme to the deposition of James II, and it notes that the tune is younger than the words.[2]

Open picture book showing a winged figure offering flowers to a clothed child in a wicker pram while another child pushes it

Walter Crane, The Baby's Bouquet, A Fresh Bunch of Rhymes and Tunes, color wood engraving, 1878. A picture book of nursery rhymes and tunes from 1878; it has no connection to this lullaby.

The familiar melody came much later, from Effie I. Crockett, who also appears in the records as Effie I. Canning and Effie C. Carlton.[1] In a 1938 newspaper account she said she was about fifteen, visiting Winthrop, Massachusetts, when she made up a tune for words in a Mother Goose book to calm a fretful baby in a hammock; her name went on the music as Canning, and most accounts say she borrowed her grandmother's name because she feared her father would not approve.[1] Sources differ on the date: the Ballad Index gives 1884, while the Library of Congress says the Boston publisher Charles D. Blake issued it in 1886, after Denman Thompson used it in the kitchen scene of his play The Old Homestead.[2][1] The Morgan Library & Museum holds a copy of Blake's edition, dated c1886, crediting her with both words and music.[3] The contralto Merle Alcock recorded it for Victor in Camden, New Jersey, on December 5, 1921, and the Discography of American Historical Recordings credits Canning as its composer and lyricist.[4] Crockett apparently earned few royalties from the song even before its copyright lapsed, and she died poor in Boston in 1940.[1]

Don Pedi's Mountain Dulcimer Mother Goose, which arranges old-time songs and nursery rhymes for solo dulcimer and singing, has it in DAD tuning; the download includes the 68-page book, a separate PDF of each of its 29 songs and an MP3 of each.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Rock A Bye Baby"

Sources

  1. Library of Congress, In The Muse: "Rock-a-Bye Baby: 'Down Will Come Baby, Cradle and All'".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Rock-A-Bye Baby".
  3. The Morgan Library & Museum: "Rock-a-bye baby: song and lullaby".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-25792. Rock-a-bye baby / Merle Alcock".
  5. Don Pedi: "Mountain Dulcimer Mother Goose - Old-Time Songs & Nursery Rhymes For All Ages".
  6. Image: Walter Crane, The Baby's Bouquet, A Fresh Bunch of Rhymes and Tunes, color wood engraving, 1878. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

← Back to Browse By Song