I went to story time at the local library this afternoon, and had a realisation - I had never before sung my son Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Or indeed, Baa Baa Black Sheep. Or any 'classic' nursery rhyme. We enjoy some baby songs that have actions (Row Row Row Your Boat, Wind Your Bobbin Up, I Had a Little Turtle), but the 'obvious' ones have never seemed obvious.
What I do sing him most, however, are songs I know the words to (and that I can sing. Immigrant Song or Killing In The Name isn't going to cut it here).
So the songs I can sing range from selections from the religious such as Down In The River To Pray ( I also extend it with 'O, babies' and 'O, kittens' if he's just dozing off but not quite asleep yet), to the popular like Bob Dylan or Blur, to the traditional (although I don't know the second verse because as a child I never liked the cat dying) to downright inappropriate songs about
Alcoholism and Adultery
Shooting Mexican Revolutionaries
and singing the lyrics of Anarchy In The UK to the tune of Edelweiss.
But not once did I ever think to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Curious...
My Grandad used to look after us a lot when we were little. The main song that I remember him singing us when we were going to sleep was 'I belong to Glasgow'. This distresses my Dad no end because it's basically a song sung by a drunken man! I've just googled it and it appears that there are more than the one first verse that he used to sing to us...can't say it ever did me any harm.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.darachweb.net/SongLyrics/IBelongToGlasgow.html