My guitar class is learning this song to perform in The Day the Music Thrived, a concert/barnraiser/awareness raiser/fundraiser for Yes! Northampton to encourage the town of Northampton MA to say YES! to an override to raise taxes to support (among other worthy causes) Arts and Music in our public schools. Come to the show on June 9 at 3pm at First Churches on Main and Center in Northampton. The Nields will be playing a rare full band show, and students from the public schools (led by their wonderful teachers whose jobs may be cut) will perform too.
A few days ago, I had the pleasure of holding a baby just 10 days old. It was mid afternoon, and I was guessing her poor mama hadn’t really slept since the birth. Elle and I took turns cuddling the baby, while my friend crept upstairs for a much needed nap. After a few minutes, the baby began fussing. I picked her up, walked around the room, sang our version of “Hush Little Baby.” Still gritchy. I switched to “All the Pretty Horsies” and did a gentle canter-y gait. More fussing. Then I started in on Ledbelly’s “Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie.” The baby pulled her head off my shoulder (strong baby!) and stared at me as if in disbelief. She stopped crying and listened as I sang. When her mother came downstairs fifteen minutes later, I told her what had happened.
“No wonder,” said her mother. “We played that song and sang that song many times while she was in the womb, and since birth.”
I’d certainly heard of this happening–baby recognizing pre-womb music post-womb–and in fact, we wrote about this phenomenon in our book <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/All-Together-Singing-Kitchen-Creative/dp/1590308980″>All Together Singing in the Kitchen: Creative Ways to Make and Listen to Music as a Family</a>. But I’d never witnessed it so directly. (Well, maybe I did. Maybe it happened with my own kids, but I was so sleep deprived then, I have no recollection.)
Today in Jay’s Suzuki class the teacher had the four-year-old pre-twinklers form a circle. She played “pass the Twinkle,” playing the first line of “Mississippi Stop Stop” to the child on her left, who in turn, wordlessly passed it on to the child on his left, and so on, around the circle. “Isn’t it amazing,” she said. “How you all knew what to do, and could do it without even saying any words. Music is a language we can all understand.”
Plans for SOS-SOA are looking up. Emails are circulating. I am making phone calls, juggling schedules, refining our focus. Meanwhile, doing a lot of thinking about the role of music in our children’s lives. Why fight to keep music in the schools?
-it’s a language we all share.
-it cuts through reason and goes right to the heart.
-when I look back on my own school memories, so many of them have to do with music class, performing, practicing an instrument. Maybe that’s just because I am a musician, but I can’t imagine growing up without all the music I had.
-it unites a group of disperate kids
-it’s the only academic discipline that is equally left-brained and right-brained
What about you? What do you remember about music education growing up?
For more about music education, visit the <a href=”http://nafme.org/”>National Association for Music Education</a>.
I am teaching this wonderful lullaby to my HooteNanny Parent Guitar class, which meets on Tuesdays in my living room. We are learning first position, mostly 3-chord songs this winter, but everyone loves fingerpicking. This fingerpick is called an arpeggio, and it is similar to “um-chuck” in that the three fingers (I, M and A, or index, middle and ring) each stay true to just one string on the guitar.
I=first string, or E string
M=second string, or B string
A=third string, or G string
The thumb, or “P”, alternates among the bottom three strings (E, A and D) depending on the chord being played.
The song can be chunked down like this:
First phrase=Am Am Dm G7 (play one arpeggio per chord)
Second phrase=C walk down to Am (see video–you “walk down” the A string with your thumb, playing the notes C, B and open A.)
Then there’s a third phrase: C C Am Am followed by the second phrase C walk down Am.
And that’s it!
Hush a bye, don’t you cry
Go to sleep you little baby
When you wake, you shall have
All the pretty little horses
Dapples and greys, pintos and bays
All the pretty little horses.
The song is in 6/8 time, which gives it a lovely rocking quality–great for lulling a baby or young child. My children loved this one when they were babies.
“The Fox” is one of the first songs Katryna and I ever learned. Our father sang it to us frequently, and there’s a recording of our baby sister Abigail, age 2 or so, singing along on the “town-o’s.” It’s an ancient song, possibly from a poem in Middle English, and our father undoubtedly heard it from Pete Seeger (who came to his school to play in the 50s), or on an Odetta or Burl Ives CD. This song has it all: life, death, survival, robbery–high drama!–and finally a cozy family scene. I have good friends who are vegans who don’t like the message, and I can understand and respect that. But foxes aren’t vegans.
(Here’s a Wendell Berry poem which speaks to this issue–see bottom of the post.)
From a guitar playing point of view, it’s pretty simple, though the pace is fast for beginners. It’s a typical three chord song (here it’s in A, though on our recordings it’s in D). I demonstrate my father’s “Um-chuck” pick which works very well for many children’s songs. It’s also a really easy pick once you get the hang of it.
The Hidden Singer
The gods are less for their love of praise.
Above and below them all is a spirit that needs nothing
but its own wholeness, its health and ours.
It has made all things by dividing itself.
It will be whole again.
To its joy we come together –
the seer and the seen, the eater and the eaten,
the lover and the loved.
In our joining it knows itself. It is with us then,
not as the gods whose names crest in unearthly fire,
but as a little bird hidden in the leaves
who sings quietly and waits, and sings.
Wendell Berry
As part of February Album Writing Month, Johnny and I wrote this song.
IMG_3554
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The lyrics are:
The wind blows The snow falls
It piles up on the ground
Big flakes, small flakes
It falls without a sound
And I can be so quiet too
Quiet as a mouse
When snow falls all around my house.
The wind blows, the snow falls
It piles up on the ground
Big flakes, small flakes
It piles up on the ground
But I can make a sound
I can jump around
My brother and I make a fort
And knock the vase with the tulips down
Vase with the tulips down
Vase with the tulips down
