Go Get Your Jacket

So let the games begin

I recently posted on Facebook that my kids had taken to singing (loudly, in public) the "Bad Horse" song from Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, (oh, just buy it). An old (we're all old now) friend from college commented that we all knew the words to "The Lumberjack Song" when we were kids and that was just as inappropriate and it never did us any harm, but, um?

(Dr. Horrible has applied for membership in the Evil League of Evil, headed by Bad Horse, who is a horse. The adenoidal guy is  Dr. H's roommate, Moist. His supervillain-sidekick power is dampening things.)

Dear old friend, I laugh at your feeble Lumberjack song! You have not seen inappropriate until you have heard two adorable three-year-olds cheerfully bellowing "So make the Bad Horse gleeful, or he'll make you his mare!" as you push them down the sunny sidewalk in their slick Eurostroller. No way can a little harmless cross-dressing beat "A heinous crime, a show of force, a murder would be nice of course!", let alone a tuneful threat of non-consensual jailhouse-style buggery. 

It's also entirely possible that I have never in my life seen anything funnier than my kids' Bad Horse chorus. I'd maybe like to scold my husband for teaching it to them but I'm too busy laughing. 

A mystery semi-solved

I'm sure it was mean of me to poke fun at uncle Jerry (actually Gerry, as it turns out), but since I now know who he is I should take this opportunity to clarify that I was talking about the character, not the singer who plays him on the Music Together CDs. I knew nothing about the real guy when I wrote that. I only know now because some helpful commenters followed up and did my work for me. Courtney wrote:

I too have been driven crazy trying to find out who John, Lynn, etc. really are. As a musician myself, it really bothers me when performers are not credited for work they do on a CD. I was not much more successful than your husband, however, I did manage to uncover who Lynn is. Her name is Lynn Lobban and she is a Broadway singer (or at least she was; she ought to be a lot older now) and has done some commercials and I think movies. The only other thing I could uncover is that it's not Uncle Jerry with a J, but Uncle Gerry. My husband and I guess he's some sort of ethnomusicologist since he tends to be featured on the tunes that come from Spanish, Irish, Jewish (and so on) culture. Hope this helps a little!

And then recently Linda followed up with this:

This link takes you to the web page for "Uncle Gerry" from Music Together--I too wondered about all the performers and I did find this info.

I'm indebted to Linda, especially. Without her inteprid googling I would not now know these things about Gerry Dignan, who is not an ethnomusicologist but may be Stuart Smalley:

Gerry Dignan has been called a troubadour for our times. He is an acclaimed singer, retreat leader, composer, and evocateur of universal song for all ages.

and...

He has been referred to as a mix of John Denver, Andrea Bocelli, Kenny Loggins and Francis of Assisi.

There is nothing I could have made up about some putative funny uncle that could possibly compete with that. I'm in awe, frankly. 

4 Guitars

Andrea: I almost bought my son a toy guitar for Chanukah, not because he'd asked for one, but because he hadn't.

A month or so back he began to scratch absently at his armpits while listening to music, and after briefly wondering if rhythm and melody brought on some sort of delusional parasitosis in him and if so what to do about it, I realized he was playing a very primitive form of air guitar. He wasn't bad, either— once I got it, it was obvious that he was keeping pretty good time, so maybe if lead wasn't in his future we could at least get him interested in playing rhythm or taking up the bass.

A few weeks later he spied the same back-scratcher he had earlier used as a baseball bat and instantly pressed it into service as a guitar, holding it slung crosswise at a convincing angle and even making cute little Guitar-God scowly faces and tossing his head around. Now, whenever a particularly favored song comes on (I'm afraid it is The Wiggles "Big Red Car" more often than not but this too shall pass) he grabs his axe and gets down, and if it isn't in evidence he asks, crossly, "Where my guitar?" until I produce it.

So of course I thought, "Buy the boy a guitar," Followed immediately by, "As far as he's concerned, the boy has a guitar, so why mess with success?" A silent guitar, which at his age and level of expertise is a feature parents might consider paying extra for.

Anna: My husband is a professional violinist who grew up in a Suzuki family. His mother teaches other Suzuki teachers how to teach children. So as you can imagine, toy musical instruments are a pretty fraught subject in our house, particularly since I grew up playing on my parents' guitars, relics from their hippie days, and not giving a hoot about tuning or methodology. I considered it a victory when I got away with buying Henry a Melissa and Doug toy plinkety-plink piano for his second birthday. Henry banged on it for awhile, made his stuffed ducky dance along, and then turned to his father and asked him to play "Twinkle" like he hears on his Suzuki CDs. So, instruments are not toys in our house. We've been offered several toy guitars, but we'll wait until Henry is old enough to play the real thing. 

 

Jennifer: I confess, I bought my two-year-old a guitar for Christmas this year. Is it a horrible cliche to live in Nashville and buy your toddler a guitar? Probably.

However, I will defend myself by saying that it was a terrific deal. I was dashing through Toys R Us back in August and skidded to a halt in front of a display of half-sized guitars. William had been asking for a guitar for weeks, and I kept flapping one hand and answering, "Some day, you can have one, honey." I want to encourage his interest in music and instruments, but I also don't want to start acting like one of those parents who is convinced she can turn her child into a superstar with a bunch of lessons at an absurdly early age. But there they were; what could I do? So I picked up the basic model and flipped it over: it looked like it had been marked down to about $20, and I figured what the hell. When I got to the register, it ran up for $14.99. 

There's only one slight problem. None of us here can play guitar. At all. He's figured out on his own how to hold it properly, but that's about all he can manage. So he's taken to holding it like a stand-up bass and playing it that way. Anna's husband would die. So I don't think anyone has anything to worry about with regard to parental pressure from our house.

Patrick: There are usually something like six or eight guitars lying around my house at any given time. I'm generally indulgent about children touching them and playing with them; after all, they're meant to be used by drunkards, plus I want to avoid a "forbidden fruit" effect. 

I have no serious quarrel with toy guitars that present themselves as toys, either. But I have mixed feelings about some of the almost-but-not-quite-real quasi-toy guitars currently available—ones with pretensions toward being tunable to a specific pitch, but which do not actually hold said pitch, nor are their strings and frets scaled for use in actual Western music. This is the worst of both worlds, really - too destructible to be a toy with impunity, but frustratingly worse than useless if you're trying to learn about conventional notes and how they interrelate.

My advice? Let a toy guitar (or a backscratcher) suffice until the kid has the attention span, coordination, and interest required for do re mi etc. THEN, there are myriad fine choices of inexpensive child-sized - yet real - instruments.

Andrea: Right. And then, again... we were playing at our friends' house the other day and Avi picked up the Hannah Montana guitar and I dunno, I think Somebody is trying to tell us something:

Life is but a void

This blog entry (filed, I see, under "music, nihilism") was enjoyable.

On our less lazy evenings we have music and dance time, a few Hokey Pokeys and a "Ring Around The Rosie" or two. (I'll instruct them not to believe it when the first know-it-all tells them the song refers to the Black Death, just as soon as they can pronounce Yersinia pestis.) Occasionally we do a little pogoing to either "Hop Around" or anything by Shonen Knife, and recently there's been quite a lot of Row, Row, Rowing.

It has been some time but now that I think back, I think I do remember being puzzled, then haunted, then attracted by the Buddhistic detachment of "Life is but a dream." At six or so. I wouldn't have read it as nihilist until I was at least seven.

De bustibus non est disputandum

I don't ask this question anymore, since I think I've heard all the answers currently in circulation, but I used to ask more seasoned parents for music recommendations and pretty much without fail would be pointed toward those compilations of cool music kidded-down to munchkin-appreciation level, like the clevely-titled Brats On The Beat. Somehow I’ve never managed to work up an interest in these, and anyway the original "Rockaway Beach" more than meets my children's (considerable) pogoing needs.

Currently, though, the children’s obsessive-compulsive behavior regarding "The Wheels On The Bus," has driven me to YouTube, where I turned up this thing by “Mad Donna.”

It’s from Mother Goose Rocks, which also features the likes of "Green Week" and "Kelly Idol," and I unaccountably kind of love it. I hadn't even spared a thought for the real Madonna since "Like A Prayer," which was a guilty pleasure back in the day, and I could not be sicker of "The Wheels On The Bus" if it had been surgically chipped into my head, which I believe it has been, but I keep hitting "play" anyway.

I was bereft, actually, when my children, fickle toddlers that they are, forsook Mad Donna for this inanity and its jangly jingles about how fun it is to share. Beware Argon the Dragon, voiced by a tone-deaf Roger Daltry. It sounds funnier than it is.

After trying a few other samples from the Mother Goose Rocks vaults I'm not tempted, particularly. Unless a kid already likes Green Day I don't see why he's going to warm to "Green Week" doing "Skinnamarink," but there's something about "The Wheels On The Bus" reimagined as "Ray Of Light," with a cameo by the Partridge Family's Mondrian bus that just works for me.

Maybe you'll like it, maybe you won't. Whatever you do, though, don't click here.

Button up your overcoat

Of all the wacky-ish old novelty tunes I tossed onto the children’s playtime playlist (they also have one for lullabies, which includes not only your more conventional “Hush Ye, My Bairnie” and “Au Claire de la Lune” but also “Bela Legosi’s Dead” and some Love and Rockets) my favorites are probably “Mera Naam a Chin Chin Choo,” a certifiably insane early Bollywood dance number, “On The Beach at Waikiki,” and Helen Kane doing “Button Up Your Overcoat.”

Helen Kane was not the voice of Betty Boop (that was Mae Questal) but she was the inspiration for the “boop boop a doop,” can you hear it?

So I was boop booping along to that, picking up Legos or whatever, and suddenly realized that the woman-child addressing her “big boy” in that 1929 hit must have been basing her admonitions on contemporary child-rearing practices. What was considered sound advice in 1929, long before “Don’t drink bisphenols, ooh-ooh/be careful at shopping malls, ooh-ooh/don’t wear heelies in the hall…” would have struck much of a chord with listeners?

Here are some of the lyrics:

Button up your overcoat,
When the wind is free,
Oh, take good care of yourself,
You belong to me!

so far so good.

Eat an apple every day,
Get to bed by three,
Oh, take good care of yourself,
You belong to me!

Be careful crossing streets, ooh-ooh,
Cut out sweets, ooh-ooh,
Lay off meat, ooh-ooh,
You'll get a pain and ruin your tum-tum!

hmm, scarily unchanged. Sweets and meat, who knew?

Don't sit on hornet's tails, ooh-ooh!
Or on nails, ooh-ooh!
Or third rails, ooh-ooh!
You'll get a pain and ruin your tum-tum!

Keep away from bootleg hooch
When you're on a spree…

OK, oh well. It was 1929. I told Avi about the bootleg hooch just yesterday, but do you think he listens to his mother?

It's 2008. Helen's frozen ponds/stocks and bonds/peroxide blondes might be today's... surgeon's knives/Second Lives/trophy wives? Write me a verse.

The mystery of Music Together

Hello everybody, so glad to see you! Hello everybody, we’re so glad to see you! Hello to John, so glad to see you! Hello to Lynn, so glad to see you too. Hello to Mommy, so glad to see you! Hello to Daddy, so glad to see you too! Hello to Uncle jerry, so glad to see you! Hello to Grandma Fred, so glad to see you! Hello everybody, so glad to see you! Hello everybody, we’re so glad to see you.

Well, hey there, Grandma Fred! I got these lyrics off the interwebs, and not the real, official interwebs either, just some random lyrics site. If you’re familiar with Music Together you will already have figured that out— the name is, of course, “Grandma Yvette,” although now I will forever think of her, and quite fondly, as “Fred.”

But who is Grandma Yvette? Who are any of these people? My husband, Kenton, looked up the history of Music Together and reported some semi-fascinating facts: did you know, for instance, that the franchise owns the rights to “Happy Birthday” and it’s them you’re supposed to be mailing that check to every time your rag-tag band of moppets breaks into a spontaneous chorus of “You look like a monkey, and you smell like one too?” Now you do.

One rainy afternoon, upon the fifteenth iteration of “Hello to Jo-hn, so glad to see you/hello to Ly-nn, so glad to see you too…” I called out to Kenton, “Who the hell are these people? Are they the founders or what?”

“Yes, he answered confidentally, “John and Lynn are the founders.”

Except, actually, it turns out, the founders are named Ken and Lili (my husband being brilliant at problem solving of every kind but dismal at remembering names), and I never did figure out who John and Lynn are supposed to be.

I can't find any credits of any kind, so there's no way to tell who these character/performers are, or if the piping voice that chimes in with “Hello to Mommy” is a boy, girl, electronic construct, or cartoon mouse. Grandma Yvette seems to specialize in spirituals and did-not-originate-with-white-people things like “Someone’s In The Kitchen With Dinah” and "John Henry" and is, one imagines, more likely their grandma by choice or convention than by blood, but those are nice grandmas too.

As for that “Uncle Jerry” character, though… Everybody calls him “Uncle,” even Grandma Fred, which seems to imply not only that he’s nobody’s actual son or brother, but that nobody even knows him all that well. I have no idea what he does for work, and I just don’t have a good feeling about him. Good-bye, Uncle Jerry, goodbye, so long, farewell!