My Babe (2:43)

“My Babe”

Single by Little Walter
Released 1955
Format 10” 78rpm / 7” 45rpm
Recorded January 25, 1955
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Genre Blues
Label Checker (catalog no. 811)
Writer(s) Willie Dixon


“My Babe” is a blues song written by Willie Dixon for Little Walter. Released in 1955 on Checker Records, a subsidiary of Chess Records, the song was the only Dixon composition ever to become a no. 1 R&B single, and it was one of the biggest hits of either of their careers.

The song was based on the traditional gospel song “This Train (Is Bound For Glory)” , which Sister Rosetta Tharpe recorded in the 1939 hit, This Train. Willie Dixon reworked the arrangement and lyrics from the sacred, the procession of saints into Heaven, into the secular, a story about a woman that won’t stand for her man to cheat: “My baby, she don’t stand no cheating, my babe, she don’t stand none of that midnight creeping”. Ray Charles had famously, and controversially, pioneered the gospel-song-to-secular-song approach with his reworking of the gospel hymn “Jesus Is All the World to Me” into “I Got a Woman”, which hit the Billboard R&B charts on January 22, 1955, later climbing to the #1 position for one week. Within days of the appearance of Charles’s song on the national charts, Little Walter entered the studio to record “My Babe”, on January 25, 1955. “My Babe” was released while “I’ve Got A Woman” was still on the charts, and eclipsed Charles’s record by spending 19 weeks on the Billboard R&B charts beginning on March 12, 1955, including 5 weeks at the #1 position, making it one of the biggest R&B hits of 1955.