“Red Rocking Chair” is a traditional Appalachian song that has circulated under many names — “Sugar Baby,” “Sugar Babe,” and “Red Apple Juice” among them. It belongs to a large, musically varied family of songs widespread in the southern mountains, especially among banjo players.
The song has no known author and is built largely from “floating” verses; folklorists were documenting versions of it by around 1910, and the banjoist Dock Boggs cut an influential recording, as “Sugar Baby,” in 1927. Some of its lines — the haunting question of who will rock the cradle and call the singer honey when the loved one is gone — reach back to far older British balladry.
The song became a staple of old-time and bluegrass music alike. The version heard here is by the Country Gentlemen, from an early-1960s album of folk songs and bluegrass.
