Bye,Baby bunting Fathers gone a hunting.Mother's gone a milking, sister's gone a silking.?

Question

Brother's gone to buy a skin to wrap the baby bunting in .

What does this rhyme mean ?

Answer 1

As a child, being raised over seas, I was sung this song in a different version. It was "Cry Baby Bunting"

The words were to explain the hardships of those of frontier times. It was a song which was sung as a lullaby to help children go to sleep and it was more for the tune , not the lyrics.

It is a mother telling her child called a bunting , that the father has gone hunting to catch food(rabbit) which they would skin, dry out and use during the brittle winters to wrap around the child to keep them warm.

The furthest they can find any documentation to the song and lyrics is that it was composed and published

around 1784. It is a folklore and there are several different lyrics which go to it, depending on where you live at which version you were raised with.

This is the English version which I was raised with and raised my children with:

Cry Baby Bunting,

Daddy's gone a hunting

Gone to fetch a rabbit skin

To wrap the baby bunting in.

Thank-you for sharing with me the version you gave, I have never heard it sung that way.

Answer 2

Sounds to me like it's fortelling of the baby's death due to negligence by the family, thus the "Bye" part. If every member of the family is busy doing chores, then something could (or will) happen to the baby.

Answer 3

This rhyme was actually one of several that occurred during the Great Plague.  The father has gone to get food for the family, the mother is doing chores, the sister is buying thread and brother is buying the shroud for the dead baby.  Baby bunting is already dead.

Another such rhyme is 'ring around the rosey, pockets full of posey, ashes, ashes they all fall down'.  this relates to the ring of roses that where placed outside the homes of known plague cases.  The posey is a flower that was thought to discourage the plague and the ashes were from the burn corpses and homes.  "All fall down" refers to the number of people who simply fell down dead from the disease.