Sugar Baby: A Song History
"Sugar Baby" has no known author, and the Traditional Ballad Index classes it not as a story ballad but as a song about a soured marriage assembled almost entirely from floating verses, stanzas that wander freely from song to song.[1] The index files it under Roud 7695, with "Red Rocking Chair" and "Red Apple Juice" among its other titles, and its editor hears it as a white blues close in spirit to improvised African-American blues lyrics.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive treats it as one branch of a large and varied song and tune family of Appalachia and the Southeast that also goes by "Little Red Rocking Chair" and "Honey Babe Blues," and it passes along Richie Matteson's warning that a second family of "Sugar Babe" songs, tied to "The Crawdad Song," is easily confused with this one.[2]
Hercules McCord, Banjo, metal and parchment, ca. 1884. An American five-string banjo of the 1880s, shown for the banjo Dock Boggs played on his 1927 record; it has no connection to the song.
The earliest date the Ballad Index gives is a 1927 record by the Virginia banjo player Dock Boggs.[1] The Discography of American Historical Recordings dates that session to the morning of March 10, 1927, in New York, with Boggs singing and playing banjo and Hub Mahaffey on guitar, and the side came out on Brunswick 118.[3] Harry Smith brought it back to listeners on his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, and after Mike Seeger located Boggs in June 1963, Boggs recorded the song again for Folkways on June 4, 1964.[4] Seeger's notes for that later recording give the banjo tuning as gDGCD, played in D rather than the usual G, and suggest Boggs probably learned the piece from his oldest brother, John, who used the same tuning.[4]
The song has also circulated under other names and in other hands: Bascom Lamar Lunsford printed it as "Red Apple Juice," Charlie Monroe recorded "Red Rocking Chair" for RCA Victor in 1949, and the New Lost City Ramblers, Frank Proffitt, Roscoe Holcomb and Clarence Ashley all took up versions of it.[1] For mountain dulcimer, a "Sugar Baby" appears among the eighteen traditional songs and tunes in The Doofus – Occasional Number 1, a collection of songs performed by the group of that name and notated by Neal Walters and Heidi Cerrigione, though the listing does not say which of the songs by that title it is.[5]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Sugar Baby".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Red Rocking Chair".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Brunswick matrix E21801-E21802. Sugar baby / Dock Boggs".
- Smithsonian Folkways: "Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years 1963–1968" (liner notes).
- Neal Walters: "The Doofus - Occasional Number 1 - 18 Traditional Songs And Tunes For Mountain Dulcimer".
- Image: Hercules McCord, Banjo, metal and parchment, ca. 1884. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.