Hush-A-Bye-Baby

Native American

Joe Bruchac has done some research that concludes the "Rock-a-bye Baby" may be based on a Wampanoag and a similar Wabanaki cradle song, telling the child to go to sleep and wishing the child to have a good dream. These are the words: "gawi dzizdziz, dzizdziz gawi (go to sleep baby, baby go to sleep) gawi dzizdziz wligawi (go to sleep baby, sleep well), gawi dzizdziz wligwazi (go to sleep baby, dream well).

The English folks had heard the Indians singing and may have picked up the lullaby.. "Rock-a-bye Baby" may have been their misperception of what would happen as a result of wrapping a baby in a cradleboard and putting the cradleboard in a tree.

There is also evidence, says Marge Bruchac, that it was a Northern European custom to strap babies into cradles, and there are Norse traditions of babies falling out of trees as one of those explanations of "where babies come from"

The song may also come from an old European incantation: you wish the child to fall, meaning you don't want it to fall (like saying, "break a leg" to mean "good luck"). There are also some Eastern European songs about brutalizing the baby, where the mother sings in a sw eet voice about boiling and burning and doing all these to the baby, and it's another of those ritual incantations so that these things won't happen. "Rock-a-bye Baby" may have been part of that.

It may also be that Europeans were aware of the fact that Native women took such careful care of their children, swaddling them and wrapping them in cradleboards and putting the cradleboards in trees so that they would be close by, and that the song may have been a mocking of that, coming from a culture which, due to high rates of infant death, proscribed that kind of closeness between mother and child. So there's some really complex cultural interaction going on that's been boiled down to that song "Rock-a-bye Baby."