What is the earliest known use of "baby" to address or refer to a lover in American song lyrics?

September 4, 2009 1:53 PM

What is the earliest known use of "baby" to address or refer to a lover in American song lyrics?

Here's Charley Patton using it in "A Spoonful Blues" in 1929 - but I assume it dates back to the teens or the aughts, at least.

posted by Joe Beese to media & arts (10 comments total)

The first known written example of baby as a form of address are in the OED:

1901 A. M. BINSTEAD More Gal's Gossip v. 74 One overhears a callow youth of twenty address a still fascinating belle of forty, to whom he is giving supper, as ‘Baby’.

1911 H. S. HARRISON Queed xiii. 167 Bad-eyed young men who congregate..to smirk at the working girls... ‘Where you goin’, baby?’

Those aren't song lyrics, but I hope that sheds some light on the subject.
posted by grouse at 1:57 PM on September 4 [2 favorites]

I suspect this will be really hard to pin down definitively, but a search of the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project shows that there was a song called Ma Rag Time Baby recorded as early as 1899.

And a search of the Hackley Collection at the Detroit Public Library shows that "baby" was well in use in other ragtime music.
posted by MsMolly at 2:13 PM on September 4 [1 favorite]

This came up recently. The earliest song I found with a date was 1897. Earlier uses were cited back to the 1860s in non-musical contexts.
posted by cobaltnine at 2:18 PM on September 4

Uh, I found a song lyric ("Well, Baby, your house rent's due") from 1890 in that earlier thread.
posted by languagehat at 2:26 PM on September 4

Whoops - the hat wins so far, then. Didn't see it while skimming the previous thread.
posted by cobaltnine at 2:34 PM on September 4

..Now aint he a large baby boy, only nineteen years old..

My True Love is a Butcher Boy, 1860.
posted by applemeat at 3:19 PM on September 4 [1 favorite]

I've been looking through some digitized sheet music collections to see if I can find anything else that beats the 'hat, but didn't find anything earlier than 1890. (applemeat's example is good, but doesn't seem to quite fit the context that you're looking for, where "baby" can be universally understood to refer to an adult without further clarification.)

If you click on the links in the left nav bar of this search, where the songs are sorted by date, the pre-1890 instances all refer to actual children, while after 1890 you can see the growing popularity of the term used to mean the equivalent of sweetheart.
posted by MsMolly at 5:13 PM on September 4 [1 favorite]

"No - baby you are not treated right", 1881 in a personal letter.
posted by blue_wardrobe at 12:32 AM on September 5

> "No - baby you are not treated right", 1881 in a personal letter.

That's completely irrelevant; it's from a mother to her daughter.
posted by languagehat at 1:18 PM on September 5

In The American Slang Dictionary by James Maitland, published in 1891, there are the following examples:

Babes: a name given to Baltimore rowdies
Baby: a prostitute's lover or fancy man
Baby act: to plead the to plead infancy as a defense to a suit at law Otherwise to beg off on the ground of youth or inexperience to weaken

The terms don't seem to be used in any of the slang dictionaries earlier than this, although Maitland himself notes in his introduction that previous dictionaries focused too much on British slang instead of American.
posted by MsMolly at 12:00 AM on September 6