Rock-a-bye Baby

A gentler ending

If you’d rather your baby’s lullaby didn’t end with a fall, here’s a last verse we wrote to sing after it. It fits the same tune.

Rock-a-bye, baby, the wind’s gone to sleep, The cradle is cosy, the branches are deep; Down come the arms that love you so, To carry you gently to bed below.

Where it comes from

These words were first printed in Mother Goose’s Melody, a book of rhymes published in London in about 1765. Older versions start “Hush-a-bye” and sometimes say the bough bends. Today most people sing “Rock-a-bye, baby” and “down will come baby, cradle and all”.

The tune most people know was published in Boston in 1886, credited to Effie Canning. She said she made it up as a teenager while rocking a baby to sleep. You can read her story on the Library of Congress music blog.

You may have heard that the rhyme is secretly about a king, or a custom of hanging cradles in trees. There’s no good evidence for either story, so we’ll treat it as a rhyme about the wind in the trees.

Old words

• bough: a big branch of a tree.
• hush-a-bye or rock-a-bye: “hush” or “rock” and go to sleep. “Bye” is the same sleepy word as in “bye-byes”.

How to sing it

• Rock or sway on the strong beats: “rock-a-bye ba-by”.
• Sing it twice through, more slowly and quietly the second time, then finish with the gentler verse.