Children's song
In practice none of these categories is entirely discrete, since, for example, children often reuse and adapt nursery rhymes, and many songs now considered as traditional were deliberately written by adults for commercial ends.
The Opies further divided nursery rhymes into a number of groups, including[3] Playground or children's street rhymes they sub-divided into two major groups: those associated with games and those that were entertainments, with the second category including[4] In addition, since the advent of popular music publication in the nineteenth century, a large number of songs have been produced for and often adopted by children.
[9] The publication of John Newbery's Mother Goose's Melody; or, Sonnets for the Cradle (c. 1785) is the first record we have of many classic rhymes still in use today.
[10] These rhymes seem to have come from a variety of sources, including traditional riddles, proverbs, ballads, lines of mummers' plays, drinking songs, historical events, and, it has been suggested, ancient pagan rituals.
[5] Nursery rhymes were also often collected by early folk-song collectors, including, in Scotland, Sir Walter Scott and, in Germany, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806–08).
[13] By the time of Sabine Baring-Gould's A Book of Nursery Songs (1895), child folklore had become an academic study, full of comments and footnotes.
[14] The Opies noted that this had two important effects: the rapid transmission of new and adjusted versions of songs, which could cover a country like Great Britain in perhaps a month by exclusively oral transmission, and the process of "wear and repair", in which songs were changed, modified and fixed as words and phrases were forgotten, misunderstood or updated.
Where sources could be identified, they could often be traced to popular adult songs, including ballads and those in music hall and minstrel shows.
[21] Many traditional Māori children's games, some of them with educational applications—such as hand movement, stick and string games—were accompanied by particular songs.
[22] In the Congo, the traditional game "A Wa Nsabwee" is played by two children synchronising hand and other movements while singing.
Awkward relations between young boys and girls is a common motif, as in the American playground song, jump-rope rhyme,[25] or taunt "K-I-S-S-I-N-G", spelt aloud.
[34] Playground songs may also feature contemporary children's characters or child actors such as Popeye, Shirley Temple, Batman or Barney the Dinosaur.
Commercial children's music grew out of the popular music-publishing industry associated with New York's Tin Pan Alley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Ella Jenkins were among the politically progressive and socially conscious performers who aimed albums at children.
Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Limeliters and Tom Paxton were acclaimed folk artists of the period who wrote albums for children.
[citation needed] The band Trout Fishing in America has achieved great acclaim by continuing the tradition of merging sophisticated folk music with family-friendly lyrics,[citation needed], and rock-oriented acts like They Might Be Giants have released albums marketed directly to children, such as No!, Here Come the ABCs, Here Come the 123s and Here Comes Science.
