What You Gonna Call That Pretty Little Baby: A Song History
"What You Gonna Call That Pretty Little Baby" is an African American Christmas spiritual built as a conversation, in which someone asks the new mother Mary what name she will give her child.[1] Because it was handed down by ear, its words have shifted and new verses have gathered around it, a few of them bringing in the wise men.[1] The earliest printing noted in the sources consulted here came in July 1903, when Jeannette Robinson Murphy, a Southerner who presented Black folk music to Northern audiences, included it in an article for The Independent.[2][3] Murphy, writing in the condescending racial terms of her day, called it a Christmas lullaby, explained that singers try out one title after another for the child, and tied one verse to a passage in Isaiah.[3] Hymnology Archive, tracing the roots of "Jesus, Jesus, Oh, What a Wonderful Child," names this 1903 song as a possible forerunner, since both refrains hail a newborn King.[2]
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Adoration of the Shepherds, with the Lamp, etching, ca. 1654. Shepherds gathered round Mary and the newborn child, etched by Rembrandt, shown for the Christmas spiritual's question to the new mother; the etching has no connection to the song.
The spiritual was featured in Black Nativity, Langston Hughes's gospel musical about the birth of Jesus.[1][4][5] Sources differ on when the show opened: one KWBU segment places its off-Broadway premiere in 1961, while another says it debuted in late 1962.[4][5] Art & Theology credits the arrangement to Alex Bradford in 1961, and on the 1962 original-cast album Princess Stewart sings the opening verse before Marion Williams takes the remaining six.[1] On KWBU's Shout! Black Gospel Music Moments, Robert Darden singles out the Williams and Stewart duets as the show's most lasting legacy and notes that their performance of this spiritual is still heard now and then.[5]
Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson made it the subject of a 1992 pen-and-ink drawing, one of twenty-six in her book The Teachings: Drawn from African-American Spirituals, and the National Lutheran Choir recorded it in 2016 for the album Christ Is Born.[1] Carol Crocker's self-published Songs Of The Spirit, which its listing calls a "one-of-a-kind volume" of spirituals, sets it for solo mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning with the words included.[6]
Sources
- Art & Theology: "Christmas, Day 9: Pretty Little Baby".
- Hymnology Archive: "Jesus, Jesus, Oh, What a Wonderful Child".
- Internet Archive: "The Independent, July 23, 1903 (Jeannette Robinson Murphy, The True Negro Music and Its Decline)".
- KWBU: "Shout! Black Gospel Music Moments: Black Nativity".
- KWBU: "Shout! Black Gospel Music Moments: Marion Williams".
- Carol Crocker: "Songs Of The Spirit".
- Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Adoration of the Shepherds, with the Lamp, etching, ca. 1654. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.