A long time ago, in a tiny apartment far, far away, I spent a long evening pacing my living room floor.
In my arms was my inconsolable newborn daughter, and I tried everything in my new-dad bag of tricks to quiet or distract her.
Nothing worked until Elvis Costello’s “Alison” came up on my CD player’s shuffle. I don’t know why that particular song calmed her down at that moment; I only know that it did. So I did what any new parent quickly learns to do in that situation: I put it on repeat and played it over and over. And over.
By the third time through, I was singing along. The fourth time through, I’d changed the name of the girl in the song from Allison to Abigail, my daughter’s name.
On the fifth repeat, I realized just how inappropriate the song was for a father to sing to his daughter, so I started making up my own lyrics. Within the span of an hour, Abigail and I had agreed on our new lullaby. From that day forward, any time it was my turn to rock her to sleep or make an owie all better, that was the song I sang.
That was our song. I’m sure you have one, too. One that your parents sang to you, or one that you sang to your children. Maybe you invented your own song. Maybe you passed down your parents’ song, or maybe you adapted or transformed it. But you probably have a song.
Bruce Springsteen had a song.
It was a song his grandmother sang to him when he was very young. It dated back to 1909, and amazingly the original recording still survives. It was written by Bobby Heath and Charley O’Donnell, sung by Ada Jones and the Peerless Quartet, made popular in the Broadway musical Miss Innocence, and it’s called “My Pony Boy.”
By the time Bruce was an adult, he’d long since forgotten most of the words. Who knows, maybe his grandmother didn’t know them either. But when his first son Evan was on the way, he sang his grandmother’s song to him as best he could:
“I made up a lot of the words for the verses; I’m sure there are real words, but I’m not sure they’re the ones I used. It was the song that I used to sing to my little boy when he was still inside of Patti. And when he came out, he knew it. It’s funny. And it used to work like magic. He’d be crying, and I’d sing it, and he’d stop on a dime. Amazing.” —Bruce Springsteen, Rolling Stone Magazine, August 6, 1992
As it turns out, the only part of the song he actually remembered was what any child could have told you was the most important part:
Pony boy, pony boy
Won’t you be my pony boy
Giddy-up, giddy-up, giddy-up, whoa!
My pony boy
Not only didn’t he remember the words to the verses, he didn’t even remember the melody. So without even being aware of its original incarnation as a girl-tames-boy romance, he recast it as a sweet, idyllic, father-and-son-explore-the-great-wide-world soother:
Ride with me, ride with me, won’t you take a ride with me
Underneath the starry sky, my pony boy
Over the hills and through the trees we’ll go riding you and me
Giddy-up giddy-up giddy-away, my pony boy
Down into the valley deep, ‘neath the eaves we will sleep
Sky of dreams up above, my pony boy
In that Rolling Stone interview, Bruce said he sang “Pony Boy” to Evan before he was born. I don’t think that was an exaggeration. Evan was born in the mid-summer of 1990, and sometime during that season Bruce recorded “Pony Boy” in his home studio–just Bruce, his guitar, and his wife’s backing vocals.
It’s a tender, intimate recording–two brand-new or about-to-be parents professing and promising their love to their child.
Bruce takes a lot of flack from fans for including “Pony Boy” on his 1992 Human Touch album, and they have a point: at that point, it had been almost five years since Bruce last released an album, and he was known to have a vault full of unreleased material. What would-have-been classic was denied an official release to make room for his son’s lullaby instead?
But Bruce didn’t record and release “Pony Boy” for us; he did it for Evan.
Because he knew he had an opportunity that few of us ever have, and that someday when he and Patti are gone, his son will always be able to return to that early recording of his own personal lullaby and hear the love, tenderness, and promise in his young parents’ voices.
He won’t even need to preserve a tape, disc, or hard drive–the internet and the Library of Congress will do that for him.
That’s a pretty amazing gift from a father to his son. Who among us wouldn’t do the same if we could?
Postscript: Time passes, and kids grow up.
And while our children may still carry our songs in their heart, that doesn’t mean they want to hear them out loud. At least for a little while.
When Evan was just two years old, Bruce sang “Pony Boy” to him from his concert stage:
But when he was about to turn fifteen… well, I imagine he had a somewhat different response on this night in 2005:
Gentle embarrassment: the tool of choice for loving parents of teenagers.
How better to make it easier for your kids to leave the nest while always making sure they know they always have a home?
Pony Boy
Recorded: June-September 1990
Released: Human Touch (1992)
First performed: July 31, 1992 (East Rutherford, NJ)
Last performed: April 27, 1996 (London, England)
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