Fais Do dO

Lyrics cited by Beth's Notes - from Familii Website.

Fais Dodo (Go to Sleep)

FRENCH:

Fais dodo, Colas mon p’tit frère

Fais dodo, t’auras du lolo

Maman est en haut

Qui fait du gâteau

Papa est en bas

Qui fait du chocolat

Fais dodo, Colas mon p’tit frère

Fais dodo, t’auras du lolo

ENGLISH:

Go to sleep, Colas, my little brother

Go to sleep, tomorrow you’ll have milk

Mama is upstairs making a cake

Papa is downstairs making chocolate

Go to sleep, Colas, my little brother

Go to sleep, tomorrow you’ll have milk

Notes: Colas is the baby’s name, most likely a nickname for Nicholas, but you can substitute any name into the song.  dodo is pronounced dough-dough.  Fais dodo is baby-talk, meaning “go to sleep”, dodo coming from the French “dormir”, and similarly,  lolo for “milk” – from the French “lait”.

Lyrics found in a publication from Epopee des zouaves pontificaux, published in 1862, which points to the song being widespread in folk literature.

Variant (the lyric with "colas" was found on the next page) from Dorothy Scarborough's On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs, 1925. Robin Giebelhausen is critical of this source, as "A white woman who collects folksongs, rarely from African Americans, but more often from white people who learned songs from black people and then subsequently shared them with Scarborough. Many layers of consent seem missing in this methodology."