It has inspired dozens of recordings and adaptations, as well as the title of Cormac McCarthy's 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses.
[1] An early published version is in "A White Dove",[2] a 1903 story for kindergarteners by Maud McKnight Lindsay (1874–1941), a teacher from Alabama and daughter of Robert B.
Dorothy Scarborough's 1925 study On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs describes the song as "one lullaby which is widely known through the South and which is reported in many varying forms, but with the spirit and the tune practically the same.
"[4] Scarborough says such lullabies were sung by enslaved mammies to the white children in their care; "the black mother often spent her tenderest love on the white child she nursed" because, while she was in the plantation house, her own children were off in the slave quarters and often sold away.
[5] In 1971, Angela Davis commented on a version similar to the Lomaxes': '"All the Pretty Little Horses" is an authentic slave lullaby; it reveals the bitter feelings of Negro mothers who had to watch over their white charges while neglecting their own children.