This song came up again in another thread here .

The version of the song with the sad lambie verse is most familiar to me, but Texas Gladden sings different words (as posted by me above and by Stewie in the other thread). Also, there are some other variations on the song available at the Library of Congress/American Memory website. (Enter "all the pretty little horses" here . For example, J.L. Goree's "Pretty Little Ponies".

So I'm wondering, are the people who don't sing the lambie verse singing "sanitized" version? (Seems like Shirley Lomax might be - if you check out the field notes for her recordings, she exhorts people not to sing that disturbing verse to children.) Or, did the lullaby exist first, and get personalized by a singer having to care for another's baby?