Having had my memory jogged by all you lullabye commentators, I suddenly
recalled that the single German song to survive in my family into
contemporary times (Great-grandfather came to the US from Bremen in the
1870s) is "Dat Du Min Leevste Buest," a suggestive night-visit song sung
regularly by my grandfather as he dandled grandchildren on foot or knee.
Again, it's an illustration of the idea (brought up most cogently, I
think, by Bess Hawes in her 1974 essay in Journal of American Folklore)
that the music of the lullabye may well be intended to soothe the baby,
but the words are almost always an expression of adult concerns. If this
can be said to extend to dandling songs as well--and I think it
can--then we may be talking about a tremendous accumulation of
unmediated psychological/emotional/personal expression conveyed to us
through oral and customary forms. Should be valuable to folklorists,
anthropologists, and social historians at least. Barre
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