Songfacts®:

• Bessie Jones was a folk and blues singer who was passionate about teaching America about African-American heritage through music and dance. In the mid-1950s, Jones met the renowned folklorist Alan Lomax, who traveled to the Georgia Sea Islands to collect music from the Spiritual Singers Society, of which Jones was a member.
  
  In 1959, he recorded Jones singing the children's song "Sometimes," a stomp-and-clap number described by folklorist Bess Lomax Hawes as "an account of the doings of magical animals and the courtship feats of human beings." It was included on the 1960 album American Folk Songs For Children, which was part of Lomax's Southern Folk Heritage Series.
• Moby's 1998 single "Honey" is built on a sample of Jones' vocal from this tune. The electronic artist heard the song on a 1993 box set of Lomax's recordings called Songs Of The South.
• The blues-rock group Larkin Poe, founded by sisters Megan and Rebecca Lovell, first recorded this in 2018 for their Venom & Faith album, but their vision for the song really came to fruition in 2020, when they reworked it with the Miami-based hybrid chamber orchestra Nu Deco Ensemble.
  
  Megan Lovell explained in a 2022 appearance on the Songfacts Podcast: "Her version is amazing and so alive, and the energy is palpable. We wanted to take the song and put it on the record, and we had an idea for having a middle section that veered away from just a cappella vocals and claps, which set us up perfectly for going in with Nu Deco because it involved the horn section. Unfortunately, we don't tour with a horn section, so we were never able to do this song live until we worked it out with Nu Deco."
• The Larkin Poe/Nu Deco Ensemble collaboration is featured on the live album Paint The Roses, which was taken from their shared livestream concert at Miami's North Beach Bandshell. Nu Deco's Jacomo Bairos and Sam Hyken were particularly excited to bring "Sometimes" to life. Bairos told American Blues Scene: "I fell in love with it because of the marching band-esque breakdown in the middle, which brought me such nostalgia from when I was a kid in band."
  
  Hyken added: "This was one of the first songs we requested as part of our collaboration, as it fits the ethos of our ensemble perfectly. This arrangement preserves all of the fantastic elements found within their studio record, while adding new string lines and percussion to create an exciting and virtuosic opener to our album."