Snake Baked a Hoe-cake

A traditional Appalachian children’s song with a simple, repetitive text: a snake bakes a hoecake, sets a frog to watch it, the frog falls asleep, and a lizard steals it. The rhyme appears in print as early as 1802, suggesting a long oral history before Sharp collected it in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. Peggy Seeger recorded it for Smithsonian Folkways on Animal Folk Songs for Children in 1957, drawing from her mother Ruth Crawford Seeger’s earlier compilation of the same name. The Seeger family also recorded a version for the Deadwood TV soundtrack in 2005.