ON THE TRAIL OF NEGRO FOLK-SONGS

A Collection Of Negro Traditional & Folk Songs with Sheet Music Lyrics & Commentaries - online book

	LULLABIES	145
	child, when one or the other might be sold; so the black mother often spent her tenderest love on the white child she nursed, and some of the most characteristic of the Negro folk-songs are the lullabies by which she crooned her baby — white or black — to sleep. There is one lullaby which is widely known through the South and which is reported in many varying forms, but with the spirit and the tune practically the same. One version is given by my sister, Mrs. George Scarborough, who learned it from Negroes in Grimes County, Texas, in her childhood, and later sang her babies to sleep by it.
	LULLABY
	Hushaby, Don't you cry, Go to sleep, little baby. And when you -wake, You shall have a cake, And all the pretty little ponies. Paint and bay, Sorrel and gray, All the pretty little ponies. So hushaby, Don't you cry, Go to sleep, little baby. Dorothy Renick, of Waco, Texas, gave me a variant several years ago, as learned from Negro mammies.