What the hell is short'nin' bread, anyway?

So Eliot has this baby apparatus thing-a-ma-jig with dangling thingys that play music (yes, that's about as specific a description as I can make), and I caught Eli singing along with one of the tunes one day--"Mama's little baby loves short'nin' short'nin', Mama's little baby loves short'nin bread..." He claimed he wasn't making it up, that those were really the lyrics of an actual song, and as usual, I thought he was full of crap at first. He's always creating fictitious factoids and then laughing his ass off at me when I believe them.
So this morning, out of curiosity and procrastination, I got on "the Google" and looked it up, and I'll be damned if it isn't a real song. You can hear it and read the lyrics here. It's a somewhat disturbing little song, as I've come to find out most children's songs are.
When Eliot was just a few weeks old I was rocking him one day and trying to sing him a lullabye, but I quickly realized that I didn't actually know the words to any lullabies, so I just started singing "Fulsom Prison Blues" to him. (Eli and I had watched Walk the Line again a few weeks before he was born.) It was the only song I could think of at that moment that I knew all the lyrics to. Anyway, now I sing it to him all the time, but I'm fairly sure it puts him to sleep not because he finds it soothing, but rather because he has come to realize that sleep is the only means of escaping Mommy's tonedeaf, nasal voice. Oh well. Whatever works. We were in Walmart (otherwise known as hell) the other day and "Fulsom Prison Blues" was playing on their Musak. I was like, "Hey buddy, they're playing our song!"
Anyway, to make a long story longer, after I read the lyrics to the weird short'nin bread song I didn't feel so bad about my own choice of lullabye. Shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die might be sinister, but whatever the guy does with the gal making short'nin bread probably isn't any better.