The lullabies.
Every tune in Hele is traditional or public domain, arranged by us for an 18-note comb. Nothing is licensed from anyone, so nothing can be taken away. Twenty-second recordings of each will play here once the comb is recorded.
Included with the app
Brahms’ Lullaby
Wiegenlied, Op. 49 No. 4, written for a friend’s newborn son and published in 1868. The most-recorded lullaby in the world, and the one most music boxes ship with.
Twinkle, Twinkle
The tune is “Ah! vous dirai-je, maman”, printed in Paris in 1761. Mozart wrote variations on it; the English words came sixty years later.
Ili-Ili Tulog Anay
A Visayan lullaby sung by a sibling or aunt while the mother is away at market. Collected in Aklan in 1956 and set down by Priscilla Magdamo. The first tune we chose. More about this lullaby.
Rock-a-bye Baby
The tune everyone knows was written in Boston in 1886 by a fifteen-year-old, Effie Canning, to a nursery rhyme already a century old.
Hush, Little Baby
Collected by Cecil Sharp in the Appalachians in 1918. The mockingbird, the diamond ring and the billy goat, in the order the singer remembers them. The words, and where it comes from.
Frère Jacques
The round every child learns first. In a music box it plays straight, one voice, which is how it started.
Lullabies pack
All the Pretty Little Horses
An older song than it sounds, first set down in Dorothy Scarborough’s 1925 collection. The horses are the promise; the lullaby is the waiting. The words, and where it comes from.
Lavender’s Blue
A broadside ballad from the 1670s, tamed into a nursery song by the 1800s. Dilly, dilly. The words, and where it comes from.
Wiegenlied (Schubert)
Schubert was nineteen. Four bars of melody, repeated, and a lullaby that has outlasted almost everything else written that year.
Bye, Baby Bunting
The rhyme was in print by 1784. The tune Hele plays is the one printed in The Book of a Thousand Songs in 1918. Four lines, over before the child can ask where father has gone.
Sleep, Baby, Sleep
Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf, the German cradle song in which the father minds the sheep, in the form printed in The Everyday Song Book in 1927.
Schlafe, mein Prinzchen
Sleep, my little prince. Long printed as Mozart’s, and still cataloged as K. 350, but written by Bernhard Flies in 1796.
Midwinter gift
Silent Night
Written for a guitar because the church organ was broken, Christmas Eve 1818, Oberndorf. In Hele it arrives every December with the Midwinter riders.
We check every melody against its history before it goes on the comb. Some well-known lullabies are more recent than they sound and still belong to someone; those we leave out, or ask first. Filipino and Japanese lullaby packs are being transcribed from field recordings and archive songbooks, and will be listed here when they are ready.
Hear one tonight
Every tune is arranged for an eighteen-note comb and slows as the spring runs out, the way a real movement does.
Or turn the key first at hele.toys/try