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larryhammerTBD is in a phase of demanding we sing to her frequently, and I've taken to ransacking leafing through our folk song collections for something, anything, that I remember from my childhood. "The Grandfather Clock" was a nice rediscovery, as was "Erie Canal."* Aside from the problem of not having the True, Correct Version of "Froggy Went a-Courting,"** there is a significant omission from all of them -- none seem to have this favorite:
* Original title: "Low Bridge, Everybody Down." Huh. Also, originally three verses instead of two.
** The one from an old Pete Seeger LP with the chorus "Here's to Cheshire, here's to cheese / here's to the pears and the apple trees / and here's to the lovely strawberries / ding-dang-dong went the wedding bells."
---L.
Subject quote from "Low Bridge, Everybody Down," Thomas S. Allen.
White coral bells upon a slender stalk,Does anyone else know this round? Or other, similar bits of loveliness?
Lilies-of-the-valley deck my garden walk.
Oh, don't you wish that you could hear them ring?
That will happen only when the fairies sing.
* Original title: "Low Bridge, Everybody Down." Huh. Also, originally three verses instead of two.
** The one from an old Pete Seeger LP with the chorus "Here's to Cheshire, here's to cheese / here's to the pears and the apple trees / and here's to the lovely strawberries / ding-dang-dong went the wedding bells."
---L.
Subject quote from "Low Bridge, Everybody Down," Thomas S. Allen.
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Date: 28 January 2015 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 January 2015 06:16 pm (UTC)---L.
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Date: 28 January 2015 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 January 2015 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 January 2015 06:14 pm (UTC)Girl Scout voices could do lovely things with that! It was usually just my mother and I.
---L.
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Date: 28 January 2015 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 5 February 2015 01:49 am (UTC)Lace underpants upon a laundry line
Polka-dot pajamas--oh my gosh, they're mine!
Oh don't you wish that you could wear them too?
But that will happen only when the seat wears through.
Oh, Girl Scouts.
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Date: 5 February 2015 03:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 January 2015 08:13 pm (UTC)I used to sing the kids "Brokedown Palace" when walking the floor with them as infants. Then they demanded I not sing to them at all, though this seems to have passed recently.
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Date: 28 January 2015 10:04 pm (UTC)Heh. Appropriate song.
---L.
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Date: 29 January 2015 12:29 am (UTC)Yes, I made a point of not singing them anything I didn't agree with the lyrics to, which rules out, e.g,. "You Are My Sunshine."
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Date: 29 January 2015 03:10 pm (UTC)---L.
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Date: 29 January 2015 04:59 am (UTC)My best friend's older daughter absolutely loved "The Wee Cooper of Fife" as a baby. (Now that she and her younger sister are old enough to understand lyrics, that one is out of the rotation.)
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Date: 29 January 2015 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 January 2015 06:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 January 2015 08:19 pm (UTC)My current version of "Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater" ends:
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Date: 29 January 2015 08:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 31 January 2015 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 31 January 2015 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 January 2015 10:37 pm (UTC)Do you have a copy of Rise Up Singing? (Songbook from Sing Out! amagzine) It's great for singable stuff - old songs, protest songs, sixties stuff like Four Strong Winds and so on. It mostly only has guitar chords, no music, but if there's anything in there you like but don't know there's some guy who has a project to learn and play every one of its 1200 songs on Youtube.
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Date: 29 January 2015 03:09 pm (UTC)We've started playing a Pete Seeger station on Pandora for background music.
---L.
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Date: 29 January 2015 04:42 pm (UTC)There was a homemade Quaker songbook somewhere in the 1970s called WInds of the People. Someone in my college dorm had, not the book, but photocopies of most of it, and we used to sing from those. Rise Up Singing, an expanded version of Winds of the People, was first issued somewhere in the 1980s. I came across it on a table at the Philadelphia Folk Festival and was literally jumping up and down in glee when I realized what it was and that I could buy my own copy. It's been reissued a couple of times since, with improvements made to it (better indexing, for one thing). If you google Rise Up Singing Project, you can find the Youtube project I mentioned earlier (the guy's name is Matthew Vaughan) which should give you more idea of the songs in it.
(Disclaimer: I have no relationships with the songbook or its editors; I just love it.)
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Date: 29 January 2015 04:46 pm (UTC)(THey will have a dilemma, though: if I recall correctly, Stan Rogers' song Mary_Ellen Carter, whence the "Rise Again" chorus comes, is in the *first* book!)
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Date: 29 January 2015 06:07 pm (UTC)---L.
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Date: 28 January 2015 11:16 pm (UTC)ETA: Oh, yes, Rise Up Singing! You are exactly the people who should have that, if you don't already.
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Date: 29 January 2015 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 January 2015 12:46 am (UTC)And I have that Erie Canal song! And my playlist for a CD for you guys is just about complete :-)
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Date: 29 January 2015 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 January 2015 01:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 January 2015 03:11 pm (UTC)---L.
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Date: 29 January 2015 07:06 pm (UTC)When I was young, we had a songbook-and-cassette thing called Wee Sing. (There were also some sequels, I believe.) I suspect there's a lot of overlap between that and a) Girl Scout and Boy Scout camp songs, and b) Rise Up Singing. The songbook contained multiple verses to longer songs; the singers on the accompanying tape tended to sing a verse or two and then move on to the next. That did give me a certain tendency to drive my mother crazy by insisting that we couldn't possibly sing the later verses, that was NOT CORRECT, we had to segue straight on to the next song in the tape's rotation!, but other than that it was a big hit with the whole family, and I can still sing a lot of them.
Hmm, what else. Everything you mention, yes. My parents sang me a lot of Scottish folk songs, especially "Skye Boat Song" (minus the bloodier Culloden verses), which they sang to me in my cradle a lot.
"All The Pretty Little Horses." "I Gave My Love A Cherry." "The Old Woman Who Swallowed A Fly." "Fox Went Out." Plenty of others I can't think of at the moment!
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Date: 29 January 2015 09:12 pm (UTC)---L.