John Brown's Baby

"John Brown's Baby" is a subtraction game disguised as a song. The words never change across the whole performance. What changes is how many of them you are still allowed to sing, because each time round the verse another word is pulled out and replaced by a gesture. By the final round the singers are producing four words and a series of rocks, sneezes, pats and waves, and the tune is doing all the work of holding the thing together.

The verse itself is four lines long and repeats one sentence three times, which is exactly what a memory game needs. Nobody has to learn new material. They only have to remember which words are already banned, and the laughter comes from the person who forgets and sings "baby" out loud in round five.

Origins

The origins of "John Brown's Baby" are undocumented. It is a well-established camp and classroom song across the English-speaking world, passed along by camp counsellors, scout leaders and infant teachers rather than by publishers, and no first printing or author has been pinned down. Songs that travel this way rarely leave a paper trail, because the people teaching them learned them the same way.

The tune, by contrast, has a clear history. It is the melody of "John Brown's Body", the marching song that spread through Union regiments in 1861 after soldiers at Fort Warren in Boston built comic verses around a comrade who happened to share the name of the abolitionist John Brown. That melody was not new either. It came from a camp-meeting hymn, "Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us", with the "Glory, glory, hallelujah" refrain already attached, credited to William Steffe and circulating by the mid 1850s.

The same tune then picked up Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic", written in late 1861 and published in The Atlantic Monthly the following year. It later carried the labour anthem "Solidarity Forever" and the playground favourite "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school". Note the order carefully. The 1861 date belongs to the tune and to its Civil War words, not to this children's song, which attached itself to an existing melody at some unrecorded later point.

Meaning & Interpretation

Read literally, the verse is a small domestic scene: a baby has a chest cold and the household treats it with camphorated oil. That is the whole plot. There is no connection to the abolitionist John Brown beyond the borrowed tune and the borrowed name, and nothing in the song comments on him.

The interest is structural rather than narrative. A strong tune can outlive any particular set of words, and a melody everyone already knows is the cheapest possible way to teach a new song. That is why the "John Brown's Body" melody accumulated hymn, anthem, protest song and nonsense verse over roughly a century and a half. The same reuse happens elsewhere on this site: The Animals Went In Two By Two borrows the marching tune of When Johnny Comes Marching Home, another Civil War song turned into a children's counting piece. One tune, several unrelated jobs.

How do you play the gesture game?

Sing the verse straight through once so everyone knows it. On the second time through, do not sing "baby"; rock a cradled pair of arms instead and carry on with the rest of the line. On the third round drop "cold" as well, replacing it with a sniff, shiver or mock sneeze. Round four drops "chest", replaced by two pats on the chest. Round five drops "rubbed", replaced by a flat hand rubbing circles. Round six drops "camphorated oil", replaced by fanning a hand under the nose. Each new gesture is added to the ones already in use, so nothing you have removed ever comes back, and the last round is mostly silence and movement.

What is camphorated oil?

Camphorated oil was camphor crystals dissolved in a plain oil, usually cottonseed or olive, and it was one of the most common household cold remedies of the early to middle twentieth century. It was listed in the U.S. Pharmacopeia and stocked by most pharmacies. Families rubbed it on the chest so the strong medicinal vapour could be breathed in. Branded ointments such as Vicks VapoRub gradually replaced it, which is why the phrase means nothing to most children singing the song today.

Was the song written about the abolitionist John Brown?

No. The children's song only inherited the name along with the tune. The 1861 marching song "John Brown's Body" did play on the abolitionist's name, though soldiers reportedly began it as a joke about a Scottish sergeant of the same name in their own unit. By the time the melody reached a nursery verse about a baby's chest cold, the historical figure had dropped out of it completely.