Because women’s work was not always recognized as labor by male collectors, most work songs have been collected from men. However, women created work songs as well. In California folklorist Sidney Robertson Cowell found waulking songs, used by Gaelic-speaking women in Scotland for fulling woven cloth; an example is “Fhillie duhinn s’tu ga m’dhi (My brown-haired lover, I’m without you).” Most folklorists now recognize lullabies as work songs too; after all, putting children to bed is a traditional parental job in all societies. Like other work songs, lullabies contain an element of protest, in which mothers express consternation with their lives and even hostility toward their babies: why else sing about putting your baby in a tree-top, so that “when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall?” Of course, this hostility is not serious, but it allows parents to vent just a little bit about the frustration that sometimes comes with the joy of parenting. Library of Congress fieldworkers have recorded lullabies in several languages across the United States, including the English-language “Come Up Horsey, Hey, Hey,” the Icelandic-language “Budar ei lofti,” and the Arabic-language “Ughniyah li al-Atfal.”

https://www.loc.gov/collections/songs-of-america/articles-and-essays/musical-styles/traditional-and-ethnic/traditional-work-songs/

Mama’s Goin’ to Buy Him a Little Lap Dog

Thea Hopkins: “Creek Lullaby”

Throughout the world, women have traditionally been responsible for laboring in the home, including childcare. This excerpt features Boston, Massachusetts singer-songwriter Thea Hopkins, a member of Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe of Martha’s Vineyard, performing the song “Creek Lullaby” from a field recording of a young Creek student named Margaret who was recorded by Willard Rhodes at Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas in 1943