Music Lyrics & Scores

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McCall, Adeline. Timothy’s Tunes. Illustrated by Anna Braune. The Boston Music Co., 1943.

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The John C. Winston Company. The Singing Mother Goose Book. 1955

Children’s poetry is rooted in ancient lullabies, nursery rhymes, and ballads, all of which were as likely to have been sung as spoken. Music’s value in instilling basic moral principles was extolled by Isaac Watts in the preface to his Divine and Moral Songs for Children. First published in 1715, the book contained simple poems that could be set to music. “What is learnt in verse is longer retained in memory and sooner recollected,” Watts observed. It also made learning more fun, or as he put it: “There is something so amusing and entertaining in rhymes and metre, that will incline children to make this part of their business a diversion.” Good lyrics and melodies, he continued, “will be a constant furniture for the minds of children, that they may have something to think upon when alone, and sing over to themselves.”

In 1744, publisher and bookseller Mary Cooper issued Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book. Though all its verses, including “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” “London Bridge is Falling Down,” and “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” were appropriate for singing, as with Watts’s book only the words were provided. It was up to the reader to match them with a suitable tune. Some songs that children still sing today date back to this early period. Jane and Ann Taylor published Original Poems for Infant Minds in 1804. Their book remains best known today for the poem “The Star,” later retitled after the first line, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The familiar melody was taken from a French folk song, “Ah! vous dirais-je, Maman” (“Oh! Shall I Tell You, Mama”), which Mozart popularized through twelve variations for piano published in 1785. The easy-to-sing tune was paired with the earlier poems in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book (1744), and with “The Alphabet Song” (1835).

By the late nineteenth century, even middle-class families could own something that had once been limited to the elite: a piano. Publishers stepped up to meet the increased demand for music that children could play and enjoy. Most scores contained only the music and lyrics, but some were richly illustrated, such as Walter Crane’s The Baby’s Opera (1877) and Pan-pipes: A Book of Old Songs (1883). As the Golden Age of Children’s Literature embraced young people’s perspectives and experiences, music books changed too. The poems in A Child’s Day in Song (1916), tell of daily life, for example, “Dirty Face” and “Sometimes I Think.” Music programs in schools began to appear around this time. Music anthologies for schools had themes ranging from playtime and bedtime to nature and manners. Useful for classroom units on careers and physical education, Songs of the Child-World (1916) has sections on “Trades and Occupations” and “Action Songs.”

In the 1940s and ‘50s, Wonder Books, Golden Books, and other series were marketed to young people. Sold in grocery stores and supermarkets, many of these books included musical notations embedded throughout the pages or at the end of the book. Tune-books with vinyl records pressed onto covers, or placed in slip cases, were popular in the 1950s and ‘60s. The Singing Mother Goose Book (1955), with full orchestra for sound effects, was placed directly on the turntable. Composers of color were largely excluded from songbooks and tune-books published for a general audience. A notable exception was the publishing house of Franklin Watts, which published Langston Hughes’s The First Book of Rhythms in 1954 and The First Book of Jazz the following year. Music books and scores in the Prelutsky Collection celebrate the longstanding relationship between lyrics and poetry, closely intertwined genres that use meter, rhythm, and repetition to evoke meaning and emotion—and, of course, capture a child’s attention and imagination.