Tom Hunter, PASS IT ON! (#9, F/91), Pp. 1,15
Children’s Music Network (CMN)
In writing songs with kids, playfulness makes the process fun and significant—playing with words, ideas and sounds, wondering about, lingering with, turning a word, idea or sound over to take another look or listen. There’s no particular point to the playfulness, no objective or bottom line. You’re just playing for the fun of it and for the significance of it, too, because, “If we examine where new ideas come from, we can see without hesitation that they come from ‘tinkering’ or ‘playing around’.”(Selma Wasserman, speech, 4/20/91) It’s the same for new words or new sounds. They come from tinkering and playing around.
So if you want to write songs with kids, I think the first step is to be playful. I usually start by singing a song or two that other kids helped write, interrupting along the way to talk about what I remember of the process—”Here we got stuck and someone said this, isn’t that a wonderful word?”, “A really quiet girl had this idea,”etc. I want to let the kids know that the “rules of the game” here are that it’s fun, the process is playful. I’m not looking for particular answers, unusual words and ideas are welcome, and I will listen to whatever they want to say. (My experience says loudly that when children know they’ll be listened to, “inappropriate” remarks—like hurtful ones or overtly obscene ones—decrease dramatically.) I don’t give these “rules” directly; I’d rather they just be a part of the process, something for them to get a sense of as we go.
With that sort of context set, I usually ask, “What are you doing these days in here (i.e., your classroom, your school)?” It’s an invitation to brainstorm, to play around. I make lists of what they say, on the chalkboard or butcher paper. Often I’ll make comments to encourage the process. For example, if someone says, “We write,” I might ask, “Do you like writing best with a pen or pencil? Do you ever write with crayons? Do you ever get to write on the chalkboard?”
Or if someone says, “We get bored,” I’ll ask, “Really bored or just a little? What’s the most boring thing you do?”
A huge part of the process hinges on whether or not we want to listen to what kids have to say. My bias is that if kids know someone really wants to listen to them, they’ll talk, they’ll engage in playfulness—not all the time and not every kid, but more often than not, and most kids. So when leading the brainstorming process, it’s useful to notice your own impulse to direct the conversation, to accent this idea over that one, to notice these kids and not those. It all has to do with listening, and it’s a rare grown-up who listens well to kids. If the brainstorming process goes slowly, I think it means that the kids have had too many experiences of no one listening to them or too much classroom time with rigid objectives and no playfulness. Then the process takes more patience and more priming the pump with questions like, “What are those things on the wall?” or, “What did you do at recess?”
I stress this part of the process because the more liveliness there is, the more kids will be involved, the more ideas and words, the more usable song material. Even if a song doesn’t come out of it, you’ve created the occasion for the kids to have fun reporting and playing with words, and someone has listened.
Once the brainstorm list is made (when the energy or ideas decrease or when the clock determines the need to move on), I look back over the list to make comments about which items might be grouped together. Action words, describing words, places—whatever connections you or the class can make—help to review and organize the list and help you begin to put the list into a song.
When it comes to actually making the song, I most often add verses to songs that exist already. For one thing, it’s a little easier. It gives the class or group a common focus and context. It also tends to demystify the sense that people who write songs are magically talented and “I’m not one of them.” I want a song to be experienced as a usable, hands-on, flexible process (bearing many finger marks,” as Ruth Seeger says), and adding a verse or verses is a manageable way to do that. It also demonstrates that folksongs and folk culture can change and grow. Educationally, it more obviously encourages playing with language and sounds by showing that once you hear the scan of a line and the rhythm of a verse you have a pattern that can be used again and again for shaping your ideas into something you can sing.
Little Blue Top
All those objectives can happen if you head out into uncharted tuneless waters (and I sometimes do). But currently, I most often add verses. An example is “The Little Blue Top”, which I think is just about the best earth song there is. (Thank you, Tony Hughes!): The rhythm is easily heard. The form is clear. And it’s very likely that a lot of things brainstormed from what’s happening in the classroom can be connected to that little blue top. I get the kids to identify with me some specifics about the form of the song—how many lines are there? How many measures per line? What’s the rhyme scheme? And then we’re ready to shape a verse. Sometimes someone will have an ideas to get the first line started. Sometimes I’ll suggest an ideas or a phrase. Most often, by this point, the playfulness has uncovered much more than can be used. And invariably, little by little, you can watch more kids play around with the rhythm and the sound of words until they fit.
Here are two examples of verses added to “The Little Blue Top”. From some Kindergartners:
“Water and sky and berries are blue,
Apples are red and strawberries are, too.
Flowers are purple and mud is brown.
If we didn’t have colors, the animals would frown.”
And from third graders:
“Sometimes there’s war as the blue top goes ’round
When much more happy ways cannot be found.
It’s scary and lots of kids hope it will stop
So peace can come back to the little blue top.”
Results need to be shown off (verses added or brand-new songs)! So invite the principal in to hear what the class has done, and the secretaries, and the lunchroom people, or visit another classroom. One useful strategy is to get different groups in the same school—grades, classroom, whatever—to add verses to the same song. When I’ve been in a school all day (maximum of 8 sessions), is fun to end the day with an assembly at which the kids song what they’ve written and the whole school joins the chorus.
These suggestions work for writing tunes, too. I always start with words (just a personal preference), and then I brainstorm musical ideas by playing different chords, rhythms, sounds on the guitar. The kids respond by letting me know how they think the song should feel and sound. School songs are fun to work on, but almost any topic will do.
Another thought: I never guarantee that we’ll get a new song done during a particular session or day. We might, but not necessarily. It’s the process that’s important, and the product might come tomorrow. Sometimes creativity, songs, poems, and paintings take time to grow, and I rebel against the dictates of a culture that wants results and conclusions and products right now. If we don’t get the song or verse done today, I’ll keep working on it after the session is over from their lists of ideas and send it back to them on tape. They can keep working on it, too, by adding to the lists, by reshaping the lines we’ve created so the process can continue. Folk songs are never really done. They keep growing. Maybe the best ideas come tomorrow or next month. Then the process keeps going and when that process is built on playfulness and listening, then writing songs with kids becomes a time of nourishing those kids into finding their own ideas and creativity, and their own sense of a song. It’s also likely to lead to some good new verses and song!