“Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” is a traditional song. It appears to have grown out of verses in the cowboy song “My Lula Gal,” which in turn comes from a family of bawdy British and Appalachian songs usually known as “Bang Bang Rosie” or “Bang Away Lulu.” The earliest known record is “I’ll Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” cut for Columbia in New York in 1931 by Buster Carter and Preston Young, with Posey Rorer of the North Carolina Ramblers on fiddle.
Charlie and Bill Monroe recorded it as the Monroe Brothers on 12 October 1936 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlie sang lead and played guitar, and Bill sang tenor and played mandolin. Bluebird issued it on 27 January 1937 as B-6773, backed with “I Am Thinking Tonight of the Old Folks,” and credited the song to Charles Monroe. Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys recorded it on 20 October 1950 at the WDAE radio station in Tampa, Florida, with Flatt on guitar, Scruggs on banjo, Curly Seckler on mandolin, Benny Sims on fiddle and Jody Rainwater on bass. Flatt and Seckler traded the lead and tenor parts between verse and chorus, with Scruggs singing baritone and Sims bass. Mercury released it on 14 December 1951 as 6372, backed with “I’ll Just Pretend,” again with a Charlie Monroe credit.
The singer would rather lie around the shack until the mail train comes back, rolling in his sweet baby’s arms, than work on the railroad or on the farm. The verses are less cheerful. He asks where she was last Friday night while he lay in jail: walking the streets with another man, and she would not even pay his bail. Her parents never liked him and drove him from her door, and if he had his life to live over, he says, he would never go there again.
Del McCoury recorded it in Glenrock, Pennsylvania, on 10 December 1967 for the Arhoolie album Del McCoury Sings Bluegrass (1968), with Bill Emerson on banjo. Dillard & Clark put it on Through the Morning, Through the Night (A&M, 1969), and Doc and Merle Watson opened Ballads from Deep Gap (Vanguard, 1971) with it. Buck Owens’s 1971 single “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” reached No. 2 on the Billboard country chart and No. 1 on Canada’s RPM country chart. In 1973 Leon Russell, recording as Hank Wilson, took it to No. 78 on the Billboard Hot 100.
