Imagine you live in a small log cabin, shanty, or earthen dugout. In the evening, your family gathers after a long day of chores, chopping wood, tilling fields, and washing laundry. Your home has no electricity, the lighting is poor, and everyone is bone-tired.

How might you and your family relax at the end of the day?

The Little House Books as a Folk Music Record

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote so extensively about the music that filled her childhood homes; the Little House on the Prairie series is essentially an archive of 19th-century American folk music​​.¹ The rhythm of her story is kept by her fiddle-playing Pa and softly singing Ma.

Dale Cockrell, American popular music scholar and Professor Emeritus of Musicology at Vanderbilt, explains, “I don’t think there are any books that better capture the way music worked in the 19th-century family. I came to the conclusion not only are the books rich in music-making, but it’s virtually a playlist of first-century American music.”

​Throughout the 19th century, playing music together at home was as standard as today’s families gathering around the TV. People played instruments and sang together from a repertoire of songs collected through family and cultural heritage, social dances, church, and traveling entertainment.²

Pa’s Fiddle and the Songs of Daily Life

Pa played songs on his fiddle for every mood and emotional need of his family as they celebrated, sought comfort, and leaned into their faith during considerable setbacks. Music for the Ingalls family and other settlers was a rich cultural space to affirm values and beliefs, and was even a means of survival.

Early in Little House in the Big Woods, Pa played his fiddle to settle Laura and Mary after a particularly rousing game of “mad dog,” where he chased the girls around the cabin until they leaped and screamed in frightful delight.​⁴​ Later in the book, the Ingalls visited extended family for maple sugaring and helped host an evening celebratory dance. Pa led the festivities by playing the fiddle and calling out the dance moves. The songs Wilder wrote about in this scene highlight the range of music available to home musicians.

One of the tunes Pa played in the celebratory dance scene was the late 18th-century song “Irish Washer Woman,” a classic Irish jig​.⁵ After that, the night became a frenzy of fast dancing with “Arkansas Traveler”, a song about a traveler meeting a squatter in a dilapidated shack and their connection over music. This song brought Grandma Ingalls from minding the boiling maple sap to the dance floor, jigging faster and faster in competition with her other son, George. The crowd went wild and drowned out the music with loud claps, stomping, and shouts before descending to the kitchen for all-you-can-eat maple candy and a feast-laden table.

Music as an element for joyful gathering and family devotion continued throughout Laura’s childhood and developed into romantic expressions during her courtship with Almanzo Wilder. She grew up hearing Pa play and sing love songs to Ma, and as her own love with Almanzo grew, she found her musical voice and sang to him regularly.

Many of their early dates in De Smet were at the local singing school, and on long drives during which Laura serenaded Almanzo with tender songs like “In the Starlight,” a popular tune with flirtatious lyrics that promised, “there’s nothing in the daylight half so dear to you and me.” Almanzo told Laura that he suggested they attend the singing school because of her love of music. “You’re always singing,” he told her while requesting she sing to him again. ⁶

Music as Comfort and Survival

Music was not just for celebration, fun, and romance. In times of struggle, both minor and significant, music was a comfort and a means of spiritual survival.

As a young adolescent, Laura struggled with Nellie Oleson’s boastful ways. Laura’s parents suggested that maybe there was more to the situation than she knew, but it was her Pa playing “Whip-Poor-Will’s Song” that helped her “thoughts untangle from their ugly snarls and become smooth and peaceful.”⁷

Throughout The Long Winter⁸​, music was used to warm bodies and metaphorically fight the raging weather outside. Early on, as the cold set in, Pa rushed to fill the shanty with wood, but it was his music that created warmth. He played a lively Scottish tune, “All the Blue Bonnets Are Over the Border​¹⁰, and ordered Laura, Carrie, and Grace to march around the room to warm their blood. The song transformed the discomfort into a triumphal mood where “they felt that banners were blowing above them and they were marching.” Afterward, Pa exclaimed that the song gave him “the spunk to like fighting even a blizzard.” ⁸

Later, as the storm raged and temperatures dropped to 40 degrees below zero, Ma struggled to warm the house, and they sang her favorite song, an old Scottish hymn, “There is a Happy Land” about a “…happy land far, far away, where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day.” It was in such hymns and African American spirituals—songs that promised salvation for the hardships of earthly life—that Ma and the family found comfort in their abiding faith.⁸

In a cathartic scene at the climax of The Long Winter, the family fought the “screaming and hammering” blizzard—personified as a beast trying to get them—with music. Cap Garland and Almanzo left earlier in the day to find wheat for the town in clear weather that turned treacherous. They had not returned as night fell, and another blizzard rolled in. The family worried as the winds howled and Pa shouted at the weather, “You can’t get at us! …we’ll beat you yet!”⁸

Pa lamented that he would feel better if he could play music, but his hands were too stiff and cracked to play his fiddle. Laura reflected, “In all the hard times before, Pa had made music for them all. Now no one could make music for him.” She suggested, “We can sing!” to comfort Pa with music, the way he had done so many times for her.

They sang, ecstatically, song after song, affirming their selfhood, persistence, and faith in God. As the storm raged outside in a counterattack, they stood and sang louder until the hay-heated stove died down and they went to bed, praying for the return of the boys and the survival of the town.

The Little House books, in many ways, were a love letter to Laura’s father, celebrating his music as much as his labor. While the homes he built kept the family sheltered, the music he played made them feel safe, loved, and protected.

Pa’s fiddle and love of music carried Laura through the vagaries of a childhood on the prairie. The “Whip Poor Will’s Song” that Pa played as a balm for his children says, “meet me when daylight is fading and is darkening into the night.”:¹¹ It is there in the twilight that we can imagine Laura and her family gathering in song with the whip-poor-will birds of the prairie.

​Lyrics to The ”Whip-Poor-Will’s Song”

1. Oh meet me when daylight is fading,
And is darkening into the night;
When songbirds are singing their vespers,
And the day has far vanished from sight;
And then I will tell to you, darling,
All the love I have cherished so long,
If you will but meet me at evening,
When you hear the first whip-poor-will’s song.

[chorus] Whip-poor-will! Whip-poor-will!
You hear the first whip-poor-will’s song’
Oh, meet me; oh, meet me,
When you hear the first whip-poor-will’s song.

2. ‘Tis said that whatever sweet feeling
May be throbbing within a fond heart,
When listening to whip-poor-will’s singing,
For a twelve-month will never depart;
To then we will meet in the woodland,
Far away from the hurrying throng,
And whisper our love to each other,
When we hear the first whip-poor-will’s song.

3. And in the long years of the future,
Through our duties may part us awhile,
And on the return of the evening,
We are severed by many a mile;
Yet deep in our bosoms we’ll cherish
The affection so fervent and strong,
We pledged to each other this evening,
When we heard the first whip-poor-will’s song.

More to Explore

• The Laura Ingalls Wilder Songbook: Favorite Songs from the “Little House” Books. Compiled and edited by Eugenia Garson
• Pa’s Fiddle Project: Listen to historically accurate recordings of the songs featured in the Little House books. Co-produced by Dr. Dale Cockrell, director of MTSU’s Center for Popular Music and a scholar of the music of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book series, and actor/producer Dean Butler, who played Wilder’s husband, Almanzo, in the “Little House” TV series.

References

1. Compass Records, “Pa’s Fiddle,” Compass Records, accessed April 15, 2026, https://compassrecords.com/artist/pa_s-fiddle/.
2. Associated Press, “Professor Brings Music of ‘Little House on the Prairie’ to Life,” Dec. 26, 2006, republished by History News Network, https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/professor-brings-music-of-little-house-on-the-prai.
3. Williams, Garth, illustration in Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods (HarperCollins, 2008), p. 98.
4. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, Little House in the Big Woods (HarperCollins, 2008), p. 35.  
5. “Irish Washerwoman,” The Traditional Tune Archive, accessed April 15, 2026, https://tunearch.org/wiki/Irish_Washerwoman_(1).
6. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, These Happy Golden Years (HarperCollins, 2008), p. 213.
7. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, Little Town on the Prairie (HarperCollins, 2008), p. 136.
8. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, The Long Winter (HarperCollins, 2008), p. 43, 44, 130, 287.
9. Millard, Harrison. “Whip-Poor-Will’s Song.” Sheet music cover, 1865. Duke University Libraries Digital Collections. Accessed April 15, 2026. https://repository.duke.edu/dc/hasm/b2090
10. Haufrecht, Herbert, The Laura Ingalls Wilder Songbook: Favorite Songs from the Little House Books, ed. Eugenia Garson, illus. Garth Williams (HarperCollins, 1999), p. 50, 103.
11. Pioneer Girl, blog post, accessed April 15, 2026, https://www.pioneergirl.com/blog/archives/4818.