Songs By and For Children:

A Legacy of Children's Music

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By Pat Campbell

Children's music has been a Folkways priority from the inception of the label. Founding father Moses Asch sought to build a library of children's records that was intelligent, playful, and inventive, seeking out adult artist-musicians as well as children who could be recorded singing with enthusiasm and verve. He distinguished his children's recordings from Hollywood-type "kiddie music"—that sweet and sugary mid-century sound of Disney's Dumbo, Snow White, and The Lady and the Tramp. The Folkways sound of children's music, in contrast, required no lush orchestrations: all that was necessary was the straight-ahead sound of singing voices, with or without a fundamental chording instrument such as a folksinger's guitar or a schoolteacher's oom-pah piano. In achieving Folkways' goal to develop "a catalogue of folk expression," an archive of "sounds of the world," how could music by and for children not be included?

Children rarely can resist making music in their everyday lives. When they hear live or recorded music, they step, sway, skip, and bounce to it. They need no special invitation to sing, either, and they do it alone, together, as they play, and along with the recordings they enjoy. Because no one has told children that they can't do music, they behave musically as a natural part of who they are, an essential quality of their well-being. Like feeling warm, fed, and well rested, they make music because they must. Children are the embodiment of music, and the Folkways collection has always chronicled their musical interests while also enticing them to join in the songs of adult artist-musicians on record.

Within the archived recordings of Smithsonian Folkways is an encyclopedic array of material meant just for children. Songs, chanted rhymes, instrumental music, and folk tales fill the stacks.

Many Folkways albums feature children's songs that have lasted for centuries, like "Sur le Pont d'Avignon" (or its Spanish-language corollary, "El Puente de Aviñón"). Some songs are inventive variations of older ones, such as "Loop de Loo," a re-design by rural Alabama children of the British play-party standard, "Looby Loo." There are also songs to accompany children's chasing games: "El Lobo" features Mexican children singing (and screaming) with excitement about a wolf who prepares to chase and capture them for his meal (...si el lobo aparece a todos nos comerá). The slapping sound of the jump rope is audible in some selections, when children rhythmically chant to the lore they have created, as in "Benjamin Franklin went to France to teach the ladies how to dance." Likewise, the rhythm of clapping hands can be heard alongside children's voices on chants like "Who took the cookie from the cookie jar?" Thanks to Moses Asch's recognition of the fieldwork efforts on streets and playgrounds of such pioneer collectors as Harold Courlander, Edna Smith Edet, Tony Schwartz, and Henrietta Yurchenco, Folkways has issued recordings of children's exuberant vocal expressions since the 1950s.

Songs are time travel devices, to such places as the back porch of a patchwork house in the southern Appalachians or a ramshackle juke-joint at the outskirts of a Mississippi town, a village of Mbuti Pygmies in a central African rainforest or a one-room sod-house in the windswept Aran Islands off the Irish coast. In a similar way, the world that so captivates children's attention can be at least partly understood by listening to the songs they value. Children's songs spell out their priorities of the world—of partners, lines and circles; of birds painted blue, red, black, and spotted; of trains, trucks, cars, and planes; of wolves, roosters, chicks (los pollitos), and horses; and of Buckeye Jim, Long John, Tia Monica, Mary (with her red dress on), Captain Jinks, and Rosie Darling Rosie. Listening to the music of children, we are transported to their world, and we hear their joy even as we grow to understand who they really are.

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