All the Pretty Little Horses
An American lullaby that promises cake and horses when the child wakes, sung slowly enough that the waking is a long way off. It is in the Lullabies pack.
The words
Hush a bye, don’t you cry,
Go to sleepy, little baby.
When you wake,
You shall have cake,
All the pretty little horses.
Blacks and Bays,
Dapples and grays,
Coach and six a little horses.
Hush-a-by, Don’t you cry,
Go to sleep, my little baby.
The promise is for the morning: cake, and every horse in the coach. The verses are short and they repeat, which is the point. A parent can sing the same two stanzas for as long as it takes. Some collected versions carry a third verse about a lamb alone in a meadow, crying for its mother. It is not sung here at bedtime, and most families leave it out, but it belongs to the song’s history, below.
Where it comes from
The song is African American, and older than any printing of it. A version appears in a 1903 story for kindergarten children by Maud McKnight Lindsay, a teacher from Alabama, where a girl sings it to her baby brother and the author calls it an old lullaby. Dorothy Scarborough collected it in many forms across the South for her 1925 study On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs, and John and Alan Lomax printed it under this title in 1934. Scarborough recorded who sang it: enslaved women, to the white children in their care, while their own children were kept in the quarters or sold away. The verse about the crying lamb is read as those mothers’ own grief. That is what the song carries, under a tune this gentle.
Why it is free to play
The song is traditional and in the public domain. Hele plays the bare melody, in the line Scarborough set down. The concert settings, Aaron Copland’s of 1950 and the Lomax arrangement of 1934, are separate works and are not used, so nothing in the app depends on a license. See the packs.
How it sounds in the app
It is arranged for an eighteen-note music-box comb, the same eighteen notes a real movement has, so the tune sits inside the range of the instrument rather than being played on top of it. Your child winds the brass key and lets go, and the lullaby slows as the spring runs down until the last note rings out on its own.
You can turn the key yourself, without installing anything, at hele.toys/try.
Hear it on the comb
This lullaby is in the Lullabies pack: six tunes, bought once and shared with Family Sharing, played on a modeled eighteen-note movement.
Or turn the key first at hele.toys/try