Rock the Cradle Joe

Most revival players learned it from John Watts "Babe" Spangler of Meadows of Dan, Virginia, born in 1882, who recorded it at home in the late 1940s with his brother Dudley on guitar. It is played across the Virginia and North Carolina border country and in West Virginia.

The words are a lullaby joke, and versions of them were in tradition well before the revival. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore prints a rhyme about Uncle Joe with a "rock the cradle" chorus, and Alan Lomax recorded Jennie Devlin, born in 1865, reciting a similar verse.