Let's try to understand what made that song surface from the huge pool of songs to take a similar form inside the heads of large numbers of people. We know almost nothing about what it did before about 1920, but since 1937 it has left all sorts of tracks. One of those is the simple children's lullaby, " Hush, Little Baby," where papa is going to buy the baby a mockingbird, a looking glass, a diamond ring, a cart and bull, a billy goat, or a dog named Rover. For the most part, we can't accurately trace songs backwards to figure out how they spread around or where they originated, but a handful of very well-known "folk songs" have left enough footprints that we can follow at least parts of their travels. A number of melodies and songs, like " Yankee Doodle," are genuine widely distributed folk songs, though they probably spread far more now by sound recordings than by one person hearing another person sing them. We don't know where " Liar, liar pants on fire" or " London Bridge is falling down" came from or why we know what they are, though this process in the 21st century is less connected to the distant past.
Most of us have at least a basic understanding of the idea that jokes, slang terms, nursery rhymes, expressions and songs sometimes filter down on top of us like cultural volcanic ash. How did Annie Brewer's version of a lullaby become a well-known folk song that supposedly belongs to us all? Does it really belong to Brewer's heirs, to the folklorist who put a microphone in front of her in 1937, or to the library it sits in?
Putting A Face on Folksong Sources: The Story of Annie Brewer's LullabyĪ common "folk song" has a surprisingly tangled story behind it.
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