Music Feeds the Soul

Sandra Boynton

One of the great things in life is watching a child fall in love with a song. When that happens, nothing else exists. The child instinctively starts moving to the beat and singing whatever he or she thinks the words are. Sandra Boynton's Frog Trouble gives children a songbook filled with likely candidates for a lovefest, and it includes the words so they can sing along with the CD with confidence, and with her signature animal characters to amplify the fun. 

What child wouldn't fall for Dwight Yoakam's ballad of a dog named Hank ("I've Got a Dog"), who howls to his crooner-owner's "lonesome song" and doesn't come when he's called, yet sticks by his human's side. A plucked string imitates a canine whining sound, and the spoons performed by Peter and Gordon Scott evoke the do-si-do of the best friends' dance. The Fountains of Wayne extol the virtues of "big trucks and little trucks and long trucks and tall," for "delivery or long-haul." A "downshift" in "Trucks" lowers the key for the singers, while a command to "throw it into fifth" leads to a modulation up. In the songbook, a pig in shades sits at the wheel of a red pick-up filled to capacity with apples. Later in the songbook/album, more than a dozen of Boynton's porkers star in Ryan Adams' wistful interpretation of "When Pigs Fly." 

Boynton and Ford vary tempos and tones beautifully. They follow up the soulful "Heartache Song," performed by Kacey Musgraves, and "When Pigs Fly" with a honky-tonk tune called "Broken Piano" (sung by Ben Folds) and the hilarious "Copycat," for which kids will attempt to keep pace with lead singer Brad Paisley trying to shake off the relentless feline chorus sporting identical hats and green guitars. For children who love to dance with partners, Boynton includes the choreography for "The Alligator Stroll" (a chicken crashes the reptiles' line dance).

In Boynton's equivalent of liner notes, which adults--especially teachers and musicians--and aspiring young singers and guitarists will regard as a treasured process log, she reveals that Alison Krauss was the first artist they signed to the project, for the elegant "End of a Summer Storm." The musicians' stellar work on this selection led Boynton and Ford to request that they play the entire album. With the variety of voices, moods and rhythms, these musicians provide the through line, along with Boynton's playful illustrations and design. You may also enjoy Boynton's TEDx Talk about working on the album.

Endurance

Sandra Boynton did what seems to be the impossible: She moved fluidly from greeting cards to board books for youngest children. The Going to Bed Book turns 30 this month, and it’s just as fresh and pleasingly surprising to toddlers today as it was when she first published it in 1982. Another of my favorites of hers, Moo, Baa, La La La! is like a song. Children come in on the title refrain and lose themselves to the music of the animal (and human) sounds.

This week I’ve been rereading Awakened by the Moon, Leonard Marcus’s biography of Margaret Wise Brown, well known for her book Goodnight Moon, illustrated by Clement Hurd. But she is perhaps little known for her innovative work with Lucy Sprague Mitchell at Bank Street, the progressive school that came to be known by its street address, at that time, in Greenwich Village. (The Bank Street College of Education is now located uptown on West 112th Street in New York City.) Together they founded the Writers' Lab where Mitchell, Brown and other writers began to share their observations of youngest children. They watched how youngsters began to play with and acquire language, more attracted to sound and rhythm than to actual words, which didn’t yet hold meaning for many of them.

We take their trailblazing efforts for granted now. Goodnight Moon is a nursery necessity. But at that time, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Mitchell and Brown, along with Edith “Posey” Thacher, Esphyr Slobodkina (Caps for Sale) and Ruth Krauss (A Hole Is to Dig, Maurice Sendak’s first picture book), were all influenced by the research they did with the nursery school students at Bank Street and the observations they shared in the Writers' Lab there. According to Marcus, it was Brown who realized that small children “did not place books in a special category of culturally exalted objects,” and therefore needed a more rugged format. William Scott, a parent at Bank Street who published many of the projects that resulted from its Writers' Lab, began printing books on durable cardboard stock “strong enough to withstand the onslaught of toddlers’ bites and tugs,” Marcus reports.

Because Boynton illustrates her own work, she smoothly moves between making a statement, such as “they hang their towels on the wall and find pajamas, big and small,” and creating images of a tall elephant hanging his towel high, and a lion placing his on a low hook, while dog busts out of bunny’s too-tight nightclothes and bunny gets lost in dog’s, to make the contrast and the joke. Margaret Wise Brown observed this is one of the contrasts toddlers enjoyed most—the playful juxtaposition of large and little, in a world where toddlers may be small in stature but stand at the center of their universe. Boynton gets all that and makes it look effortless, as the best authors of board books do. Her books are, in content and form, built to last.

Raising Word Connoisseurs

I’ve just returned from a two-day silent retreat on the Hudson River. I try to do this once or twice a year. Every time I go, I’m amazed by how few words we really require. I was thinking, too, about very young children who do not yet have language, but who still manage to communicate effectively. They reach for a bottle, push away a spoonful of peas, and hold up their arms when they want to be held.

What a sense of accomplishment they must feel when they can name things—a bottle, a blanket. And then to be able to call out for Mama, Papa, Grandma and their big brother or sister—and to point to themselves and say their own names! The world is theirs for the asking! All that time they were wordless, they were extremely watchful. Once they begin to speak words, it can feel like a current of electricity has been unleashed. They’re sharing all they’ve gleaned in those months of silent observation.

Sandra Boynton’s books milk that early knowledge and churn it into humor like butter. She sets up scenes very familiar to toddlers: a barnyard in Moo, Baa, La La La!, a set of clothes in Blue Hat, Green Hat. Then she takes what a child knows and upends the facts in a nonsensical way. While cows “moo” and sheep “baa,” three pigs sing and dance! In a recent blog, I mentioned a discussion with Leonard Marcus in which he described just how early children begin to develop a sense of humor, and how much of a child’s early attempts at humor are playing with what they know in order to make a joke themselves.

All of us have experienced the pleasure of a peek-a-boo game, even before a child has words—they take pleasure in knowing someone is there but pretending to hide. When my niece Maggie was just over one year old, she delighted in the punchline of Sandra Boynton’s book: I would talk to Maggie on the phone, and she wouldn’t say much, but when I asked her, “What do three pigs singing say?” she’d answer, “La! La! La!” During my most recent visit (Maggie’s now two), she was drawing something at a small plastic desk in the living room. I asked her, “Maggie, are you drawing at your easel?” She repeated, “EA-sel” and started laughing. She loved the word. Throughout the day, she’d spontaneously say, “EA-sel” and start laughing. I noticed she picked out other words she’d hear in conversation and collect those, too, like a word connoisseur.

So let’s hear it for humor! Humorous books encourage a playfulness around a child’s early ideas about language and concepts. Once children are engaged this way, the possibilities for expanding their base of knowledge seems limitless. If I had my way, they’d all be word connoisseurs.