Getting Critical With Music

When I first started writing this chapter I posted a message on Facebook asking for instances of children engaging with music and creating lyrics for songs. Within minutes, I received numerous replies. Some focused on children playing with or approximating songs in ways that intersect with schooling:

Dylan is 4 and learning to spell words so she takes the lyrics to BINGO and spells words, like mommy, daddy, her name, her sister’s name, grandma, grandpa, Anne (her babysitter), princess, fairy … you know, all that is important to her!

When Peter was about 5 or so, he was singing along with “Born to Be Wild.” He had a toy guitar that played the song. He was shouting “Head out on the highway! Looking for subtraction!”

Jim’s parents found him in his crib singing the Beatles’ “Let it Be”—except he thought it was an alphabet song: Letter B.

I made up a song when I was 9 years old. It was a song about my name and my home address!

106Other stories reflected ways that children come to understand language through use, which sometimes results in interesting lexical selections, as in the following examples.

I had a (4-year-old) student who would sing, “I got the moves like a jaguar” for “moves like Jagger.”

My son Aaron loved “It’s a Grand Ole Flag”; instead of singing “high flying flag,” he sang “high fivin’ flag.”

Some instances were stories of songs created to elicit particular emotions or to demonstrate a particular feeling.

One mom shared that her 5-year-old daughter changed the words to “Under the Bamboo Tree” from Meet Me in Saint Louis, singing, “I love-a-you but you don’t love me” … She said her daughter was clearly mad at her for something!

When our twins were born [5-year-old Poppy] came to the hospital and made up this amazing song about how she was going to take care of them and protect them—I was sobbing!!!

Covers of other songs were created to elicit laughter, as in the following instances:

My daughter was singing “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz. My friends all have horses.”

Simon made up a song when he was 5. It went, “Cockroacheating bugs! Cockroach-eating bugs! Everywhere! Everywhere! Spiders and frogs! Spiders and frogs! I will save you! I will save yoooooooouuuuuu!”

There were also instances shared of children clearly following the rhythm of the music and filling in words to fill the beat, as in the following examples.

For that “Drift Away” song: “give me the beat boys to free my soul,” my grandkid sang “give me the pizza, my feet’s not sore …”

I used to think the Beatles “Paperback Writer” was saying “Take the back, Right turn.” I would sing that at the top of my lungs, when I was about 4.

107What is important to note about these examples, and the number of stories that people excitedly shared within minutes of my request for such stories, is that music clearly has had a place in all of these children and adults’ lives and that they have used songs in different ways to achieve different ends, including having fun. The instances shared are examples of music and songs that were created for different purposes in different contexts. Interestingly, very little has been done in terms of exploring intersections between music and songs specifically and critical literacies with younger children. There are examples of work done with hip-hop and other more contemporary music genres, but this work has generally taken place with adolescent or adult learners. For instance, Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2002) have written about how they utilized “Hip-hop music and culture to forge a common and critical discourse that was centered upon the lives of the students, yet transcended the racial divide and allowed [them] to tap into students’ lives in ways that promoted academic literacy and critical consciousness” (p. 88). Reflecting on their experiences introducing hip-hop and other elements of popular culture into more traditional dominant curricula led them to believe “that there are countless possibilities for urban educators who wish to jump outside the box and tap into the worlds of their students in order to make more powerful connections with traditional academic texts and affirm, in meaningful ways, the everyday lives of those they teach” (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002, p. 91).