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What is the oldest lullaby in the world?

One of the oldest known lullabies is a 5,000-year-old Babylonian song. Its lyrics seem to come to us from around the corner.

nytimes.com - The Melancholy Mystery of Lullabies - The New York Times

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The lullaby my father sang most often to me was ‘‘Goodnight, Irene.’’ He would sing the chorus, but then he didn’t quite know the verse, it seemed to me, because the rhyme scheme was off. (‘‘Sometimes I live in the city, sometimes I live in the country,’’ he would sing, and then he would repeat the chorus.) I can remember well his tuneless voice — part of what is so moving to me about lullabies is that they are usually sung by people who ‘‘can’t sing’’ — and I remember that sometimes I would just pretend to be asleep, because I would feel guilty, knowing that I wasn’t anywhere near asleep, and that he was trying to help me. Only when I was a teenager did I hear a recorded version of ‘‘Goodnight, Irene.’’ It was sung by Nat King Cole, and the chorus was as I remembered it, but the verses were different. And yet I recognized which verse my father was singing inaccurately: ‘‘Sometimes I live in the country/Sometimes I live in town/Sometimes I have a great notion/To jump in the river and drown.’’ I don’t think my father was regularly thinking about jumping in a river and drowning. I also don’t think he was consciously bowdlerizing the song to make it more ‘‘appropriate’’ for me. Now that I’m older, I suspect that while singing a lullaby to me he must also have sometimes been singing to himself, or daydreaming, or playing over the day in his mind, or replaying an argument from work. Occasionally, singing must have even functioned as a kind of whistling in the dark for him, for whatever it was that had been worrying him. And in that sense, the hidden darkness of the song, which a part of him must have registered, probably helped him, the way that speaking a dark feeling can. A couple of times I have sung ‘‘Goodnight, Irene’’ to my daughter, and first her lip quivered and then she began to sob. I have often thought that lullabies, whatever their words, mostly just communicate ‘‘I love you.’’ But after my attempts at ‘‘Goodnight, Irene,’’ I started to think that no matter what we try to hide or show in a lullaby, other meanings make their own way through. If the primary function of lullabies is to lull a baby to sleep, another function is to let the singer speak. Maybe this is one reason the lyrics of lullabies are often so unsettled and dark. One way a mother might bond with a newborn is by sharing her joy; another way is by sharing her grief or frustration. We see this in songs across time. A 200-year-old Arabic lullaby still sung today goes:

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I am a stranger, and my neighbors are strangers;

I have no friends in this world.

Winter night and the husband is absent.

And an old Spanish lullaby from Asturias, written down by the poet Federico García Lorca, goes:

This little boy clinging so

Is from a lover, Vitorio,

May God, who gave, end my woe,

Take this Vitorio clinging so.

We assume the sound of these songs is sweet, as no lullaby endures without being effective at putting babies to sleep. Think of ‘‘Rock-a-bye Baby,’’ the way it tenderly describes an infant and its cradle falling to the ground: The singer gets to speak a fear, the baby gets to rest; the singer tries to accommodate herself to a possible loss that has for most of human history been relatively common, and the baby gets attentive care. In the Arabic and Spanish lullabies, the singers get to say something to the one being — their new burden, their new love — who can’t and won’t judge or discipline them for saying it. When even relatively happy, well-supported people become the primary caretaker of a very small person, they tend to find themselves eddied out from the world of adults. They are never alone — there is always that tiny person — and yet they are often lonely. Old songs let us feel the fellowship of these other people, across space and time, also holding babies in dark rooms. In 1928, when Lorca gave a lecture in Madrid about the Spanish lullabies he had for years been collecting, he spoke of a woman he had heard singing a sad lullaby, saying that ‘‘a living tradition worked in her, and she faithfully executed its commands, as though listening to the ancient, imperious voices echoing in her blood.’’ After hearing her sing, he said, he ‘‘tried to collect lullabies from every corner of Spain; wishing to know how my countrywomen lull their children to sleep, and after a while I gained the impression that Spain utilizes its saddest melodies and most melancholy texts to tinge her children’s first slumber.’’ He also noted that the woman he heard singing the sad song, upon approach, looked happy. Most of the American lullabies that have come down to us through the years are also sad. The bough has broken; darling Clementine is lost; even my sunshine, my only sunshine, has, you will learn if you exit the chorus and enter the next verse, gone away. (My daughter sings ‘‘You Are My Sunshine’’ with the custom lyric ‘‘when skies are great,’’ and I can’t sing her the main verses without crying, and so naturally, I don’t sing them at all.) The sadness in those traditional songs, once noticed, is nearly unbearable, which may be why so many people just sing the choruses, leaving the main sentiment ‘‘forgotten.’’ Still, it can seem strange that these are the songs we have wanted, for so many years, to keep singing to one another. It’s almost as if the songs are trying to work some magic — as if by singing we're saying, Sadness has already touched this house, no need to come by again.

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nytimes.com - The Melancholy Mystery of Lullabies - The New York Times

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