Rock-a-bye Baby
English nursery rhyme and lullaby
"Rock-a-bye baby on the tree top" (sometimes "Hush-a-bye baby on the tree top") is a nursery rhyme and lullaby. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 2768.
Words
The rhyme exists in several versions. One modern example, quoted by the National Literacy Trust, has these words:
The rhyme is believed to have first appeared in print in Mother Goose's Melody (London c. 1765), possibly published by John Newbery, and which was reprinted in Boston in 1785. No copies of the first edition are extant, but a 1791 edition substitutes "Hush-a-by baby" at the start of the first line. The rhyme is followed by a note: "This may serve as a warning to the proud and ambitious, who climb so high that they generally fall at last."
James Orchard Halliwell, in his The Nursery Rhymes of England (1842), notes that the third line read "When the wind ceases the cradle will fall" in the earlier Gammer Gurton's Garland (1784) and himself records "When the bough bends" in the second line and "Down will come baby, bough, cradle and all" as the fourth.
Origin
The scholars Iona and Peter Opie note that the age of the words is uncertain, and that "imaginations have been stretched to give the rhyme significance". They list a variety of claims that have been made, without endorsing any of them:
that the baby represents the Egyptian deity Horus
that the first line is a corruption of the French "He bas! là le loup!" (Hush!
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Rock-a-bye Baby” is english nursery rhyme and lullaby. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Rock-a-bye, Baby and English, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rock-a-bye Baby” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.