“Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” is a traditional American song first commercially recorded by the duo Buster Carter and Preston Young in 1931, with Posey Rorer on fiddle — a recording released by Columbia Records that has since served as the canonical reference. The song’s roots trace deeper into Anglo-American folk tradition: it appears to have developed from the cowboy song “My Lula Gal,” which itself descended from a family of bawdy British and Appalachian songs generally known as “Bang Bang Rosie” or “Bang Away Lulu.”
Preston Young is on record as having recollected hearing the song “somewhere or other” before recording, and adding enough of his own verses that he considered it his own composition by the time of the 1931 session. That kind of overlay — a traditional song reworked just enough by a particular singer that the line between traditional and authored becomes blurry — is typical of how the country and bluegrass canon was assembled in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
The song crossed into bluegrass through Flatt and Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, and others, becoming one of the most reliably called pieces at jam sessions. Its driving structure, simple chord changes, and singalong hook make it as durable a piece as any in the bluegrass repertoire.
