Rock The Cradle Joe: A Song History
"Rock the Cradle Joe" is an old-time reel in D that the Traditional Tune Archive ties to Patrick and Franklin Counties in southwestern Virginia, with versions also reported from North Carolina and West Virginia.[1] According to the Archive, most of the versions played in today's old-time revival trace back to one fiddler: John Watts "Babe" Spangler, born in 1882, of Meadows of Dan, Virginia, who made private recordings of it in the late 1940s with his brother Dudley backing him on guitar.[1] Among the tune's recorded sources, the Archive lists a 1977 County Records album of rare Patrick County fiddle recordings made in 1948 and 1949.[1] The sources consulted say little about the tune's life before Spangler.
Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle; Augustine-Alix Pellicot Roulin), oil on canvas, 1889. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). The painting is not connected to the tune.
The tune has picked up a variety of floating verses, and the Archive points to much older songs on the same cradle-rocking theme: an English song licensed in 1631 and an Irish song about an old man rocking a cradle.[1] The Archive catalogues it separately from "Rock the Cradle Lucy," a breakdown associated with north Georgia and Oklahoma, though the two share some of the same floating lyrics.[2] Musically, the Archive cross-references a related second strain in one version of "Sally Ann."[1]
Revival musicians have kept it in circulation; recordings listed by the Archive include ones by James Leva and Bruce Molsky, the Plank Road String Band and clawhammer banjoist David Winston.[1] For mountain dulcimer players, it is one of the 75 tunes in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam, drawn from the dulcimer jamming tradition.[3]
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