So, tonight I sang my youngest daughter (4 months old) to sleep with a “lullaby” – Whiskey in the Jar.
I tried more traditional lullabies prior, they didn’t work. For some reason, she really latched on to that one and went right out. Bizarre.
When my daughter was a colicky baby, the one thing that was sure to settle her down was Fairport Convention’s “Red and Gold.” And it had to be Fairport Convention…me or her dad singing it didn’t cut it. As soon as she heard the opening chord, she’d go quiet immediately…it was like magic.
The scary thing was, we only had the song on a mix tape a friend of mine had made, and in rewinding it one day, we accidentally erased part of it! The CD it was on wasn’t available in the States, and I had an English friend combing the music shops in London for a copy.
Redwolf
Not so strange… a little whiskey makes me sleepy too.
I like it. It is certainly better than the one about the cradle falling.
It puts me to sleep as well.
Mind ye, I’ve played it a million times…well it feels like a million anyway.
Slan,
D. 
Latent hostility isn’t uncommon in many lullabies. How about the one about bees and flies pecking your eyes?
Way down yonda’, down in the medder [meadow]
There’s a poor little lambie.
Bees an’ the butterflies peckin’ out his eyes
Poor lambie cried fo’ his mammy.
I’ve always been very fond of Humpty Dumpty.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nditpSF9h4c
Lovely little verse…
Slan,
D. 
oh what verse 
I admit to not understanding half, but what I did was … 
question: who is this Humpty Dumpty they are singing about?
Just remember to pay Metallica royalties to sing that song.
I’ll have to learn and or/listen to Whiskey in a Jar.
This is The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly, a poem written by James Joyce in his Finnegans Wake as a fictional publicly circulated satire on the novel’s unfortunate protagonist, H.C.E.
Nice…
I always thought that the bould Humpty was some sort of analogy for Ireland.
Joyce can be a miserable little fcuker at times…
Being a Dub…I get most of the references…
Joyce I’ll never understand…
Some baby was that fella…
Slan,
D. 
At the end of the day you never know, Joyce being Joyce. He was obsessed with Ireland, detesting it and yet endlessly fascinated with it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he layered it in to his meanings in the “Ballad”.
I am not at all ashamed to say I never bothered to finish Finnegans Wake; I became convinced that he penned it only to entertain himself, really; it was a yelpy, asymmetrically-squinting and rather brutish tome of Dada, and I got the distinct impression that out of the carefully crafted and painstaking codes and nonsense, he was basically giving the reader the “bird”.
Well, I gave it right back. I shut the cover for good. Reading it was like unexpectedly catching a lout in the throes of self-abuse, and I didn’t need him doing it posthumously in my head. Nuh-uh.
I like his earlier stuff well enough, though.
Yeah..the early stuff is fine.
Finnegans Wake..fcuk knows what’s goin’ on there…
Ulysses, my spelling is dodgy, is an absolute masterpiece…
Mind ye..to appreciate it ye have to know the turf..and I know every inch of it..
Last time I was back in Dublin, one of my sisters asked to me did I recognise the place..
It has changed but the streets still have the same name..
I know those streets, every yard and inch…every alley and lane..
My Town…and Joyces beautiful Dublin..
Yeah…every single stone and step.
Alas..
Slan,
D.
As God is my witness, I thought Humpty Dumpty was an egg . . .
My youngest was a horribly cranky baby (still is) and she would only go to sleep at night to Willie Nelson singing Red Headed Stranger. We tried other stuff but it had to be that song.