All the Pretty Little Horses/Hush-A-Bye

 "All the Pretty Little Horses" (also known as "Hush-a-bye") is a traditional lullaby from the United States. It has inspired dozens of recordings and adaptations, as well as the title of Cormac McCarthy's 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses. The melody is also used in the score of the film Misty of Chincoteague based on the book by Marguerite Henry. 

The origin of this song is not fully known. The song is commonly thought to be of African-American origin. Author Lyn Ellen Lacy is often quoted as the primary source for the theory that suggests the song was "originally sung by an African-American slave who could not take care of her baby because she was too busy taking care of her master's child. She would sing this song to her master's child".^[1] However, Lacy's book Art and Design in Children's Books is not an authority on the heritage of traditional American folk songs, but rather a commentary on the art and design in children's literature. Still, some versions of "All the Pretty Little Horses" contain added lyrics that make this theory a possibility.

One such version of "All the Pretty Little Horses" is provided in the book American Ballads and Folksongs by prominent ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, though he makes no claim of the song's African-American origins. "Way down yonder, In de medder, There's a po' lil lambie, De bees an' de butterflies, Peckin' out its eyes, De po' lil lambie cried, "Mammy!"" Another version contains the lyrics "Buzzards and flies, Picking out its eyes, Pore little baby crying". The theory would suggest that the lyrics "po' lil lambie cried, "Mammy"" is in reference to the slaves who were often separated from their own families in order to serve their owners. However, this verse is very different from the rest of the lullaby, suggesting that the verse may have been added later or has a different origin from the rest of the song. The verse also appears in the song "Ole Cow" and older versions of the song "Black Sheep, Black Sheep".

A generation before Alan Lomax, writer Dorothy Scarborough, educated at Oxford University and holding a PhD from Columbia University, researched folk songs throughout the American South and devoted four pages of her book On the Trail of Negro Folksongs (1925) to variations of this song, all of which were provided, directly or indirectly, by African Americans. 

The best-known versions of the song are written from the perspective of the mother or caretaker singing a baby to sleep. The singer is promising the child that when he or she awakes, the child "shall have all the pretty little horses."

An extra verse appears in some versions of the song. The added lyrics appear to be from the perspective of an African-American caretaker who is singing about how her own baby, her "lambie", is not being cared for due to her care of her charge. The origin of this verse cannot be known, since the refrain also appears in the folksongs "Ole Cow" and "Black Sheep, Black Sheep". 

To download the easy alphanotes sheet music, look here. Enjoy!

Lyrics:

Hush-a-bye, don't you cry,
Go to sleep my little baby.

When you wake you shall have
All the pretty little horses.
Black and bays, dapples, grays,
All the pretty little horses.
Hush-a-bye, don't you cry,
Go to sleep my little baby.
Hush-a-bye, don't you cry,
Go to sleep my little baby.

When you wake you shall have
All the pretty little horses. 

A Tisket, A Tasket

"A Tisket A Tasket" (Roud Folk Song Index 13188) is a nursery rhyme first recorded in America in the late nineteenth century. The melody to which the nursery rhyme is sung recurs in other nursery rhymes including It's Raining, It's Pouring; Rain Rain Go Away and Ring around the Rosie. It was further used as the basis for a very successful and highly regarded 1938 recording by Ella Fitzgerald, composed by Fitzgerald in conjunction with Al Feldman (later known as Van Alexander). 

The rhyme was first noted in the United States in 1879 as a children's rhyming game. It was sung while children danced in a circle. One of the number ran on the outside of the circle and dropped a handkerchief. The nearest child would then pick it up and chase the dropper. If caught, the dropper either was kissed, joined the circle, or had to tell the name of their sweetheart. 

Ella Fitzgerald and Al Feldman (later known as Van Alexander), extended and embellished the rhyme into a jazz piece that was her breakthrough hit with the Chick Webb Orchestra in 1938. It has since become a jazz standard. The lyrics changed the color of the basket to brown and yellow. In Ella's version a little girl picks up the note and then takes the basket after it is carelessly left on the ground. A follow-up song written by Fitzgerald and Webb entitled "I Found My Yellow Basket" (1938) was less successful. 

The song was a major hit of the "pre-chart" era, reaching number one in Billboard's sheet music and Record Buying Guide (jukebox) charts, also number 1 on Your Hit Parade.

The song was included in Hayley Mills' 1961 album Let's Get Together with Hayley Mills titled Green and Yellow Basket with extra verses describing how the dropper felt about losing the letter.

Bing Crosby included the song in a medley on his album On the Happy Side (1962).

Lines from the song have been mentioned by Stevie Ray Vaughan, Prince, Half Man Half Biscuit, Ganksta N-I-P, The Shangri-Las, Scarface, Richie Rich, Eminem, Madonna, and Boondox.

Nabisco did a take-off of the song for its ad campaign in the 1970s, with the lyrics "A Triscuit, A Triscuit, Baked only by Nabisco." 

The song was used in the opening of the movie The Cowboy and the Lady (1938), but was not credited. Parts of it were played by an orchestra, used as background music, and sung by Harry Davenport.

Curly Howard recites a paraphrase of the (non-musical) rhyme in the Three Stooges short We Want Our Mummy (1939).

The music for the song was used in the opening scene of John Ford's 1940 film The Grapes of Wrath to help establish the contemporary time frame of the events of the film.

Ella Fitzgerald performed the song in the Abbott and Costello film Ride 'Em Cowboy (1942).

A rendition of the song was also performed in the Paul Thomas Anderson movie The Master (2012).

To download the easy alphanotes sheet music, look here. Enjoy!

Lyrics:

A-tisket a-tasket
A green and yellow basket
I wrote a letter to my love
And on the way I dropped it

I dropped it, I dropped it
Yes, on the way I dropped it
A little girlie picked it up
And took it to the market

She was truckin’ on down the avenue
Without a single thing to do
She was peck, peck, peckin’ all around
When she spied it on the ground

A-tisket a-tasket
She took my yellow basket
And if she doesn’t bring it back
I think that I shall die

A-tisket a-tasket
A green and yellow basket
I wrote a letter to my love
And on the way I dropped it

I dropped it, I dropped it
Yes, on the way I dropped it
A little girlie picked it up
And took it to the market

(Was it red?) No, no, no, no
(Was it brown?) No, no, no, no
(Was it blue?) No, no, no, no

Just a little yellow basket

Rivers of Babylon

 "Rivers of Babylon" is a Rastafari song written and recorded by Brent Dowe and Trevor McNaughton of the Jamaican reggae group The Melodians in 1970. The lyrics are adapted from the texts of Psalms 19, and 137 in the Hebrew Bible. The Melodians' original version of the song appeared on the soundtrack album for the 1972 movie The Harder They Come, which made it internationally known.

The song was re-popularized in Europe by the 1978 Boney M. cover version, which was awarded a platinum disc and is one of the top-ten, all-time best-selling singles in the UK. 

The song is based on the Biblical Psalm 137:1-4, a hymn expressing the lamentations of the Jewish people in exile following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BC: Previously the Kingdom of Israel, after being united under Kings David and Solomon, had been split in two, with the Kingdom of Israel in the north, conquered by the Assyrians in 722 BC which caused the dispersion of 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel. The southern Kingdom of Judah (hence the name Jews), home of the tribe of Judah and part of the tribes of Levi and Benjamin, was free from foreign domination until the Babylonian conquest to which Rivers of Babylon refers.

In the Rastafarian faith, the term "Babylon" is used for any political system which is either oppressive or unjust. Rastafarians also use "Babylon" to refer to the police, often seen as a source of oppression because they arrest members for the use of marijuana (which is sacramental for Rastafarians). Therefore, "By the rivers of Babylon" refers to living in a repressive society and the longing for freedom, just like the Israelites in captivity. Rastafarians also identify themselves as belonging to the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The original version specifically refers to Rastafarian belief in Haile Selassie, by changing references to "the Lord" in the Biblical text to "Far-I" (a shortened form of his name before he was crowned, Ras Täfari) and "King Alpha". Both terms refer to Selassie (Selassie's wife Menen Asfaw is known as Queen Omega). In addition, the term "the wicked" replaces the neutral "they" of Psalm 137 in the line "they that carried us away captive required of us a song...". According to David Stowe,

Brent Dowe, the lead singer of the Melodians, told Kenneth Bilby that he had adapted Psalm 137 to the new reggae style because he wanted to increase the public's consciousness of the growing Rastafarian movement and its calls for black liberation and social justice. Like the Afro-Protestant Revival services, traditional Rastafarian worship often included psalm singing and hymn singing, and Rastas typically modified the words to fit their own spiritual conceptions; Psalm 137 was among their sacred chants. 

 After its release in 1970, the song quickly became well known in Jamaica. According to Brent Dowe, the song was initially banned by the Jamaican government because "its overt Rastafarian references ('King Alpha' and 'O Far-I') were considered subversive and potentially inflammatory". Leslie Kong, the group's producer, attacked the government for banning a song with words taken almost entirely from the Bible, stating that the Psalms had been "sung by Jamaican Christians since time immemorial". The government lifted the ban. After that, it took only three weeks to become a number-one hit in the Jamaican charts.

It reached an international audience thanks to the soundtrack album of the 1972 film The Harder They Come, which is credited with having "brought reggae to the world". The song was later used in the 1999 Nicolas Cage movie Bringing Out the Dead and the 2010 Philip Seymour Hoffman film Jack Goes Boating.The song is also featured in Season 3 - Episode 2 of the TV series Outer Banks.
"Rivers of Babylon" was covered in 1978 by Germany-based disco band Boney M., with a version that was released as a single. Boney M.'s release stayed at the no. 1 position in the UK for five weeks and was also the group's only significant US chart entry, peaking at no. 30 in the Pop charts. Boney M.'s version of the song remains one of the top ten all-time best-selling singles in the UK, where it is one of only seven songs to have sold over 2 million copies. In Canada, the song was a top 25 hit on the RPM magazine's Top 100 singles chart and reached no. 9 on the Adult Contemporary chart. The song also reached No. 1 on the South African Springbok chart, where it remained for a total of 11 weeks, making it the No. 1 song on that country's year end charts. The song was the first single from the band's equally successful 1978 album, Nightflight to Venus. Some controversy arose when the first single pressings only credited Frank Farian and Reyam (aka Hans-Jörg Mayer) of Boney M.; after an agreement with Dowe and McNaughton, these two were also credited on later pressings.
The Rastafarian language was excised from the lyrics for the Boney M. version. Although the group performed an early mix of the song on a German TV show and sang "How can we sing King Alpha's song" as in the Melodians version, it was changed to "the Lord's song", restoring the original, biblical words, in the versions that were to be released. To fit the meter, "O Far-I" became "here tonight" rather than the original, biblical "O Lord".

To download the easy alphanotes sheet music, look here. Enjoy!

Lyrics:

By the rivers of Babylon
There we sat down
Yeah, we wept
When we remembered Zion

By the rivers of Babylon
There we sat down
Yeah, we wept
When we remembered Zion

When the wicked
Carried us away in captivity
Required from us a song
Now how shall we sing the Lord's song
In a strange land?

When the wicked
Carried us away in captivity
Requiring of us a song
Now how shall we sing the Lord's song
In a strange land?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Let the words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart
Be acceptable in thy sight here tonight
Let the words of our mouth and the meditation of our hearts
Be acceptable in thy sight here tonight

By the rivers of Babylon
There we sat down
Yeah, we wept
When we remembered Zion

By the rivers of Babylon
There we sat down
Yeah, we wept
When we remembered Zion

By the rivers of Babylon
(Dark tears of Babylon)
There we sat down
(You got to sing a song)
Yeah we wept
(Sing a song of love)
When we remembered Zion
(Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)

By the rivers of Babylon
(Rough bits of Babylon)
There we sat down
(You hear the people cry)
Yeah we wept
(They need their god)
When we remembered Zion
(Ooh, have the power)

By the rivers of Babylon
(Oh yeah yeah)
There we set down
(Oh yeah yeah)
Yeah we wept
(Dark tears of Babylon)
When we remembered Zion
(Ooh, yeah yeah yeah)
By the rivers of Babylon

Wellerman (Sea Shanty)

"Soon May the Wellerman Come", also known as "Wellerman" or "The Wellerman", is a folk song in ballad style first published in New Zealand in the 1970s. The song refers to the "wellermen", pointing to supply ships owned by the Weller brothers, who were amongst the earliest European settlers of Otago.
In early 2021, a cover by Scottish singer Nathan Evans became a viral hit on the social media site TikTok, leading to a "social media craze" around sea shanties and maritime songs. 

The history of whaling in New Zealand stretches from the late eighteenth century to 1965. In 1831, the British-born Weller brothers Edward, George and Joseph, who had immigrated to Sydney in 1829, founded a whaling station at Otakou near modern Dunedin in the South Island of New Zealand, seventeen years before Dunedin was established. Speaking at centennial celebrations in 1931, New Zealand's Governor General Lord Bledisloe recalled how the Weller brothers had on their voyage to New Zealand "brought in the 'Lucy Ann' (the Weller brothers' barque) a good deal of rum and a good deal of gunpowder...and some at least were rum characters". From 1833, the Weller brothers sold provisions to whalers in New Zealand from their base at Otakou, which they had named "Otago" in approximation of the local Māori pronunciation. Their employees became known as "wellermen". Unlike whaling in the Atlantic and northern Pacific, whalers in New Zealand practised shore-based whaling which required them to process the whale carcasses on land. The industry drew whalers to New Zealand from a diverse range of backgrounds encompassing not just the British Isles but also Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Pacific Islanders and Indigenous Australians. The whalers depended on good relations with the local Māori people and the whaling industry integrated Māori into the global economy and produced hundreds of intermarriages between whalers and local Māori, including Edward Weller himself, who was twice married to Māori women, thus linking the Wellers to one of the most prominent local Māori families, the Ellisons.

At its peak in 1834, the Otakou station was producing 310 tons of whale oil a year and became the centre of a network of seven stations that formed a highly profitable enterprise for the Wellers, employing as many as 85 people at Otago alone. From the Otakou base the Wellers branched out into industries as diverse as "timber, spars, flax, potatoes, dried fish, Māori artefacts, and even tattooed Māori heads which were in keen demand in Sydney". However, given that the Colony of New Zealand would not be declared until 1840, the Wellers were treated as foreign traders and were affected by protectionist British import tariffs on whale oil. By 1835, the year that Joseph Weller died in Otago, the brothers became convinced of the need to abandon the station even as they branched out into massive land purchases in New Zealand, which amounted to nearly 3 million acres (12,000 km²) by 1840. The Weller brothers' success in the whaling industry was fleeting, and they were declared bankrupt in 1840 after failed attempts at large-scale land purchase in New South Wales. The Otakou station closed in 1841. In 1841, the Court of Claims in New South Wales ruled that the Weller brothers' purchases of land in New Zealand were legally invalid, after which the Wellers "slipped unobtrusively out of the pages of New Zealand history". Commercial whaling in New Zealand continued until the 1960s.

The song's lyrics describe a whaling ship called the Billy o' Tea and its hunt for a right whale. The song describes how the ship's crew hope for a "wellerman" to arrive and bring them supplies of luxuries.

"Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguin' is done
We'll take our leave and go"

"Wellerman" chorus

According to the song's listing on the website New Zealand Folk Song, "the workers at these bay-whaling stations (shore whalers) were not paid wages, they were paid in slops (ready made clothing), spirits and tobacco." The chorus continues with the crew singing of their confidence that the "tonguin'" will be the last step of their plight. Tonguing in this context refers to the practice of cutting strips of whale blubber to render into oil. Subsequent verses detail the captain's determination to bring in the whale in question, even as time passes and the quartet of whaling boats is lost in the fight. In the last verse, the narrator conveys how the Billy o' Tea is still considered locked in an ongoing struggle with the whale, with the wellerman making "his regular call" to strengthen the captain and crew. 

To download the easy alphanotes sheet music, look here. Enjoy!

Lyrics:

There once was a ship that put to sea
The name of the ship was the Billy of Tea
The winds blew up, her bow dipped down
Oh blow, my bully boys, blow (huh)

Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguing is done
We'll take our leave and go

She'd not been two weeks from shore
When down on her a right whale bore
The captain called all hands and swore
He'd take that whale in tow (huh)

Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguing is done
We'll take our leave and go

Da-da-da-da-da
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da

Before the boat had hit the water
The whale's tail came up and caught her
All hands to the side, harpooned and fought her
When she dived down low (huh)

Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguing is done
We'll take our leave and go

No line was cut, no whale was freed
The captain's mind was not of greed
And he belonged to the Whaleman's creed
She took that ship in tow (huh)

Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguing is done
We'll take our leave and go

Da-da-da-da-da
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da

For forty days or even more 
The line went slack then tight once more
All boats were lost, there were only four
But still that whale did go (huh)

Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguing is done
We'll take our leave and go

As far as I've heard, the fight's still on
The line's not cut, and the whale's not gone
The Wellerman makes his regular call
To encourage the captain, crew and all (huh)

Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguing is done
We'll take our leave and go

Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguing is done
We'll take our leave and go