Our Singing Children

by Jane Palmquist

As a music educator, I eagerly awaited last fall’s performance of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Let’s Build a Railroad, a children’s musical history of railroad construction in the United States presented as part of the Ruth Crawford Seeger Centennial Festival. The lively performance by Jody Diamond, Mary Ann Haagen and Larry Polansky was enthusiastically received by sixty symposium participants and seventy-five public school students bused to Brooklyn College for the program. All listened attentively to the storytelling, folksinging, and banjo/mandolin interludes. When the adults spontaneously joined in the chorus of “John Henry,” however, children spun around in their seats and stared in amazement, apparently stunned by the sight and sound of an audience participating in a sing-along. Despite the music’s accessibility and the welcoming manner of the adults, few of the children participated. Singing a simple folk song seemed an unbelievable and foreign concept to them. I left the performance profoundly saddened. How and when was the practice of folksinging lost to these children? How can folk music traditions be restored? Ironically, these were some of the very problems Ruth Crawford Seeger addressed over a half century ago when she compiled three volumes of children’s folk songs.

By the early 1940s, Crawford Seeger’s interests in folk music, coupled with the responsibilities of motherhood, led her to delve into music education, beginning with weekly volunteer teaching at the Silver Spring Cooperative Nursery School and eventually leading to what biographer Judith Tick called a “career as a music consultant in early education.” Drawing from songs compiled for the 1941 publication, Our Singing Country, and supplemented by additional sources, Crawford Seeger produced three collections of children’s songs: American Folk Songs for Children (Turtleback, [1948] 1980), Animal Folk Songs for Children (Linnet, [1950] 1993), and American Folk Songs for Christmas (Linnet, [1953] 1999). Each volume included melody and text, simple piano arrangements, and short commentaries on the songs. Their usefulness has been significantly augmented by the release (and re-release) of three companion recordings performed by her four children and six grandchildren.

Ninety-four of the songs appearing in American Folk Songs for Children were recorded by Mike and Peggy Seeger in 1978 and reissued in 1996 (Rounder Records 11543/44) in a compilation of the same title. The songs were drawn almost exclusively from southern African American and Anglo American sources, many obtained through Crawford Seeger’s meticulous transcriptions of John and Alan Lomax’s field recordings from the 1930s. Mike and Peggy’s performances are engaging and exuberant, yet with an efficient feel. Most have similar tempi and textures, featuring unison or simple two-part harmony singing, either unaccompanied or with spare instrumentation. A number of songs, such as “Old Molly Hare,” are in call and response form. Others, such as “Oh, John the Rabbit,” have short repeated refrains, making it easy for anyone to join in.

It is refreshing to hear Mike and Peggy’s singing—real voices of real people singing real music, rather than the slick, over-produced sound of many children’s recordings. Both singers skillfully employ scoops, slides, and bent pitches rarely heard in contemporary recordings of children’s music. The banjo, mandolin, autoharp, dulcimer, and fiddle accompaniments, while unfamiliar to many of today’s children and classroom teachers, are tasteful and appropriate, often realizing Crawford’s single bass line accompaniments. The accompanying CD booklet is filled with fascinating observations on text variation, tune adaptations, singing style, and the recording process itself. Unfortunately, little information about the songs is included. Readers are referred to the original book, which also lacks precise attribution of music tradition, cultural origins, or form/style (Anglo American ballad, African American work, and so forth).

American Folk Songs for Christmas (Rounder CD 0268, 1989) presents a slightly different approach to children’s folk songs. Unlike the other recordings which are collections of songs without a thematic thread, the fifty-three pieces on this CD are grouped in three logical sections pertaining to Christmas: stars and the preparation; the birth; celebration and festivities. Here, Peggy’s and Mike’s voices are a decade richer. The addition of the voices of Penny Seeger and Crawford’s grandchildren and more varied instrumental accompaniments including slide guitar, bowed psaltery, piano, mandolin, fiddle, English concertina, banjo, autoharp, harmonica and dulcimer add a depth and variety missing in the first recording. While the music is appropriate for all ages, this CD seems intended more for older children. Also, the songs on the Christmas recording have been transposed and adapted to suit the individual musicians, as described in Peggy Seeger’s liner notes. The overall effect of this CD is that of simplicity and sincerity.

My favorite CD set is Animal Folk Songs for Children and Other People (Rounder CD 8023/24, 1992) performed by all four of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s children, Mike, Peggy, Barbara, and Penny Seeger and six grandchildren: Neill, Calum, and Kitty MacColl; Sonya and Rufus Cohen; and Kim Seeger. Ranging from wistful to silly to jubilant, the songs lend themselves easily to educational objectives. Each song clearly exemplifies some concept appropriate for an elementary music class: simple contrapuntal accompaniment, chromatic pitch sets, cumulative song form, call and response form, pedal point, hand-clapping accompaniments, free tempo, blues tonality, open intervals, and so on. The songs are fun, singable and imaginative. Most encourage active participation through repetitive vocal refrains (“Little Rooster,” “Song of the Doodlebug”) and clapping (“Jane, Jane,” “Jack, Can I Ride?”). For general classroom teachers, the songs readily lend themselves to lessons in language arts, such as narrative form, exaggeration, repetition, rhyming, personification, and anthropomorphism. The simple accompaniments contribute to the song without distracting from or competing with the vocal line—important for the musically inexperienced. As with the other CDs, liner notes on the cultural, geographic, and stylistic background of the individual songs would be helpful.

Ruth Crawford Seeger and her descendants have preserved this music joyfully, intending for it to be adapted and sung by others. In tandem with her three song collections, these recorded sets offer wonderful source materials for music and classroom teachers and for parents wishing to introduce children to the venerable tradition of group folksinging.

—Brooklyn College

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