A Singing Game: A Personal History of “When I Was a Baby” by Jeanne Pitre Soileau

A Singing Game: A Personal History of “When I Was a Baby” (University Press of Mississippi, 2026) examines a series of variants of the classic singing game. “When I Was a Baby,” like other traditional singing games, is based around a verse or rhyme paired with a set of movements. This singing game was made up by children and passed down by classmates, siblings, and friends to other children over a period of at least 150 years.

Jeanne Pitre Soileau traces “When I Was a Baby” through its many permutations, from its earliest appearance in folklore to variations uploaded to YouTube, and introduces the varied folklorists who collected it through its history. As the years go by, the anonymous child poets who keep it alive, keen observers of change, spice it up with new vocabulary and pantomimes, and incorporate into it more piquant social commentary. Part folklore study, part memoir, A Singing Game also explores Soileau’s journey of becoming, through trial and error, a specialist in south Louisiana child lore. Altogether, A Singing Game is an important addition to the children’s folklore canon.

Jeanne Pitre Soileau is author of What the Children Said: Child Lore of South Louisiana, winner of the 2022 Opie Prize; and Yo’ Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Louisiana Children’s Folklore and Play, winner of the 2018 Chicago Folklore Prize and the 2018 Opie Prize. She spent fifty years accumulating recordings of children as they answered a short list of questions related to their verbal play. Her study of schoolyard conversations is a treasure trove of children’s networking, speech play, group policing, and imaginative sparring.