"Shortnin' Bread" (also spelled "Shortenin' Bread," "Short'nin' Bread," or "Sho'tnin' Bread") (Roud 4209) is a song written by James Whitcomb Riley in 1900. A folk version was published by E.C. Perrow in 1915.

Origins

"Shortnin' Bread" is often thought of as a traditional plantation song. However the first version was written by white poet James Whitcomb Riley in 1900. His song was named "A Short'nin' Bread Song—Pieced Out", the chorus of which is:

Verse

Folk version

Titled "Shortened Bread", E.C. Perrow published the first folk version of this song in 1915, which he collected from East Tennessee in 1912. The folk version of the song—as with Riley's— does not have any distinct theme, but consists of various floating lyrics, some relating to "shortnin' bread", some not. The traditional chorus associated with the folk song goes:

Shortening bread is a fried batter bread, the ingredients of which include corn meal, flour, hot water, eggs, baking powder, milk and shortening.

Other versions

The Wiggles are an Australian children's music group formed in Sydney, New South Wales, in 1991. The current members of the group are Anthony Field, Lachlan Gillespie, Simon Pryce, and Emma Watkins. The original members were Field, Phillip Wilcher, Murray Cook, Greg Page, and Jeff Fatt. Wilcher left the group after their first album. Page retired in 2006 due to ill health and was replaced by understudy Sam Moran, but returned in 2012, replacing Moran. At the end of 2012, Page, Cook, and Fatt retired, and were replaced by Gillespie, Pryce, and Watkins. Although Cook and Fatt retained their shareholding in the group and all three continued to have input into its creative and production aspects.

Field and Fatt were members of the Australian pop band The Cockroaches in the 1980s, and Cook was a member of several bands before meeting Field and Page at Macquarie University, where they were studying to become pre-school teachers. In 1991, Field was inspired to create an album of children's music based upon concepts of early childhood education, and enlisted Cook, Page, and Fatt to assist him. They began touring to promote the album, and became so successful, they quit their teaching jobs to perform full-time. The group augmented their act with animal characters Dorothy the Dinosaur, Henry the Octopus, and Wags the Dog, as well as the character Captain Feathersword, played by Paul Paddick since 1993. They travelled with a small group of dancers, which later grew into a larger troupe. The group's DVDs, CDs, and television programs have been produced independently since their inception. Their high point came in the early 2000s, after they broke into the American market.

The following is a list of the television episodes featuring the Australian children's music group The Wiggles.

The Wiggles created two seasons, entitled The Wiggles, of their own series. They were produced and shown in Australia in 1998 and 1999, and shown in the U.S. beginning in 2001. It was in these episodes and in their early videos that The Wiggles began their practice of featuring toddlers as performers.

In 2002, The Wiggles began filming three seasons worth of shows exclusively with the ABC: Lights, Camera, Action, Wiggles aired on ABC 4 Kids in 2003, and The Wiggles Show in 2004 and 2005. The network called them "the most successful property that the ABC has represented in the pre-school genre".Paul Field, The Wiggles' general manager, reported that a meeting at a New York licensing fair with Grahame Grassby, the ABC's acting director of enterprises, led to the ABC's "enthusiastic" agreement to produce The Wiggles' TV shows. A sixth season of The Wiggles' television series featuring Sam Moran, who replaced original group member Greg Page in 2006, was filmed and began airing in Australia in 2008, entitled Wiggle and Learn.

The Wiggles is the debut album by the group of the same name. As a student music project at Macquarie University, the band assembled a group of songs reworked from The Cockroaches as well as arrangements of children's music. It was the only album that involved Phillip Wilcher as one of the group's members. The album sold 100,000 copies, and received Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) and Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) awards.

Background and development

In 1991, while working with the early childhood music department at Macquarie University, Phillip Wilcher met musician and former member of the Australian rock group The Cockroaches, Anthony Field, who was studying child development. According to Wilcher, Field asked him to join The Wiggles, which would become "Australia's foremost children's entertainment act", and to help them produce the album. The album was dedicated to the memory of Paul Field's infant daughter, Bernadette, who had died of SIDS in 1988.