Singable Songs For The Very Young

Published Jan 25, 2022, 10:00 AM

How a musical experiment became the most iconic kids’ album of all time.

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Here we go. There's nothing more comforting than hearing the soft crackle of a needle on a record. The more we get together again, the more we get together your life friends and my friends, sorry, your friends, the more we get together. When I started listening to Raffie, I ordered his first kid's album on vinyl, single Moore Songs for the Very Young and Sorry, Raffie. I got it on eBay, so you won't be seeing any of this money. But as soon as I got it, I went all in, maybe a little too much. Love of bis and children's songs are just kind of weird and halfway terrifying, Like, what is this song even about it? I can imagine it on a Beatles album. Also, so why the kids love Whistle so much? I wonder? Is this strategy me into madness. I have these wild, almost conspiracy theories about how he's naming his albums. I'm not actually sure what that means, but it sounds fun, that little burbling keyboard sound. I'm gonna go ahead and call it a club banger. Dear Raffi, I like your hat. Do you write lots of songs? Because I like them a lot. I appreciate his attention to detail on putting this very comfortable song after that kind of scary, weird song, I started to see just how carefully crafted it was. Starting with the cover. It's a portrait of Raffi in crayon, drawn by a seven year old fan, and it really captures Raffi, the beard, the guitar, he's even sitting on a stool as if he's performing at some coffee house in the village. And at the bottom he added his personal flare with the words great with a peanut butter sandwich. The cover loan speaks to Raphie's commitment to his audience and do his great attention to detail. Looking back, it feels like it was like pulling teeth, but it wasn't quite. But even something like that crayon border, I tried it in four or five different colors, and I cut the paper out and put it on the rest of the cover and stood on a chair looking down. Well, it's so well put together. Just the artwork alone is so well composed and so thoughtful and so intentional. What do you think of yourself as a perfectionist I was back then, but I mean even without that, you you strive for excellence you know, if I did a good job, I'm proud of it. Where do you think this came from? This drive to do something excellent, because it's not within everybody to be completely excellent at all times. I was a very good student when I was younger. I was always near the top of my class. There was a push to excel that came from my parents, and there was also the model of my father's photography, where he was immaculate and what he did he had high standards, and I think I I soaked up a lot of that, you know, so I gave it my best certainty. Raphael's father, Arto, was a master portrait artist. So was Arto's father. These men had confidence in their trade and worked constantly. When Arto presented his clients with a finished product, he'd only give them one proof, just one proof that met his standards of perfection. I know something about having a perfectionist father. My dad, Andres was an aerospace machinist, a trade where there's no room for error. He drove two hours to and from work each day, coming home smelling like metal. I think about that every time I don't want to go out and do a set, or when a joke doesn't land just right. His dedication to his craft set the bar for me, leading to my own perfectionism, something Raffi has struggled with. Two In his book, he writes that he used to take things too seriously. It was always a push and pull between following joy and meeting the standards set by generations of Cabukians, especially when it came to sweating the small stuff. And you can see it in the liner notes of single bowl Songs for the very Young, where no detail has missed and no opportunity for a little more playfulness is left on the table. You credit Santa for playing the sleigh bells, Well, you got credit Santa. Nothing Raffie did was by accident. I'm Chris Garcia and This is Fighting Raffie, a ten part series from My Heart Radio and Fatherly in partnership with Rococo Punch, about the life, philosophy, and the work of Raffie, the man behind the music. Raphi was seven in nine. At night, he was playing gigs and smokey bars, loud clubs and coffee houses around Toronto to make some extra cash. He started playing for a new crowd in Toronto. There was a program that used to pay folk singers to come into the classroom sing songs with kids like Michael Roll the Boat, Ashore, Swing Low, Sweet Area, all that kind of stuff, you know, and that was fun. He'd also reunited with his high school sweetheart, Deborah Pike also known as deb Or Debbie, who was a primary school teacher. Deb taught Raphy the words to these songs he hadn't grown up with. So I had to learn Bah bah black sheep word for word, and I went wow. Raphy didn't really know any kids. He'd never really even thought about them until they became his audience. I'm marvel that what I was learning about kids, the kind of people. They are there spontaneous for sure, and they're learning all the time. Everything is fresh and new for them. They're learning what it feels like to be human. Something happened when he showed up with a guitar and sat down on a rug surrounded by eager, white eyed kids. He held their attention. He was a natural. That's when Deb's mom, Daphne, made a suggestion, maybe Ralph he should make an album for kids, and I thought, well, that's an interesting idea. After all, RAPI wouldn't be the first folk singer to make an album for kids. One of his heroes, Pete Seeger, did it, maybe he could too. He and Deb decided to do some field research. She and I visited a couple of records stores as we called them in the nineteen seventies, and we noticed that most, if not all, the children's recordings were stuck in some lowly been at the back of the store, and there was a sign that said to nine nine or something like it was. It was like they were just pieces of extraneous trash or something. This is what Raffi was up against. He needed to persuade the music industry to take children's music seriously, to invest in it. And to do that he had to make something of quality, an album that demonstrated what kids deserve. The language in most children's albums at the time didn't reflect anything, I mean just it just talked down to children, as if they were all babies and idiots. That's Burt Simpson, Ralphie's longtime friend, collaborator and now senior associate at Troubadour Raphy's record company. Bert, along with his wife Bonnie and Deb, became Raffie's official educational advisors. What Bonnie and Debbie and I had was a lot of experience with very young children and a lot of educational theory. But on the most practical level, we knew what kids like, We knew what they would sing. Ralphie called them the Committee. Bert, Bonnie and Debb were well versed in what young kids needed to thrive. They were teachers who believed that children should be active participants in their education. They subscribed to the progressive educational models that were gaining popularity in the sixties and seventies, like Monessori and the free school movement. Raphie immersed himself in these ideas. It felt like he and the Committee were getting down to something essential. Children are people like you and me, their whole people. Just because they're younger doesn't mean they're lesser people, And that the way to be with children is to treat them with respect for the people that they are, keeping in mind where they are beginning stage of life. You see there, your compassion comes up here. These kids are learning all about what it's like to be who we are as adults. Only it's like they're in their adults and training kind of thing, right, And how can you not have compassion for a child who's basically doing their best, you know, and learning from there, Raffie and the committee came up with a basic album philosophy. It was simple. One the songs had to be fun for kids to sing to. The album had to be enjoyable for adults, and three, the album would respect children as listeners. So Ralphie had his experts, he had his album philosophy. He knew what he wanted the album to sound like. Now he needed musicians. So I enlisted the help of my good friend and multi instrumentalists, Ken Whitely. And that was the smartest thing I did, because Ken said, yeah, man, let's do it. So I played banjo and mandolin and you know different kinds oft and keyboards, you know, piano, accordion. This is Ken Whiteley. And when Ralphie says he's a multi instrumentalist, well that's an understatement, because woo's all that kind of stuff. Cannon Raffie met in their twenties through the Toronto folk scene and reconnected after both had started to make contacts in the industry. That's how kennew about a studio nearby where they could record Ralphie's album. In n I had recorded a couple of albums at this studio that was ten dollars an hour in the basement of these two brothers where they lived in the suburbs of the city called Hamilton, Ontario. There's the Landwa Brothers, Bob Lanjue, his brother Daniel Lanoix Danny for all you music nerds, Yeah, that Daniel Lenois, producer of you Two's Octung Baby, Dylan's Time out of Mind. He produced Brian Know, Willie Nelson, I Mean, Lou Harris, Neil Young, the man Rolling Stone called the most important record producer to emerge in the eighties, started with Raffie No Wonder. I love this album so much. Dan Lenois is a legend and I am not cuckoo bananas for noticing this album's exquisite production value. It was Daniel Lenoi's mother's home in the basement studio ad egg Carton's on the ceiling. It occupied the whole basement. There was a control room and they could move baffles around to sort of create an isolated space. I said to myself, I'm getting my money's worth here. Everything was starting to come together. The idea was to create an album for kids that would be tonally and lyrically appropriate, but also musically dynamic and interactive. It would have beautiful, pristine, high quality production, and it would embrace the fact that kids were a real audience, just like their parents. So with beginner's luck, we proceeded to record in that setting. After months of planning, it was go time for Raffi's first children's album. Bob and Dan landwas sat behind the board. Raffi and his musicians were tuned up and ready to go. Ken was, you know, doing his multi instrumentalist magic. He'd play guitar here, he'd played banjo there, he'd play something else. And his brother Chris Whitelee, very talented musician, played trumpet and he played harmonica. He played trumpet on Robbing in the Rain. That turned out to be a great horn section that that he did. Robbing in the ring. What a saucy fellow, robbing in the ring on your socks of yellow, running in the garden on your nimbo feet, digging for your dinner with your long, strong beating. I do remember bumping up and down in my little red wagon because you know, it's basically Raphy singing and playing guitar and me overdubbing half a dozen other instruments on bumping up and down in my little red wagon, Bumping up and down in my little red wagon, bumping up and down in my little red wagon. Won't you be in my dark? So these songs. The more we get together with mandolin and down by the bay Willoughby Wallaby who had trumpet in it, one track after another, this little album that could started to gain form. You know, Peanut butter sandwich made with jam, one for me and one for David m Rama. Peanut butter sandwich made with jim sticks stick sticky stick stick. I love to picture it. Ken Whiteley playing every instrument he can get his hands on, Dan Lenois and his mom's basement, telling RAFFI, hey, Raffy, because who was coming in a little flat on peanut butter sandwich. Let's go ahead and take it from the top. We literally, quote unquote didn't know what we were doing, which is a delightful way to be when you're making music because you're not self conscious about it. I mean, if you listen to Willoby Wallaby woo and listen to the what could I even call it? It's like a vocal instrumental in the middle that dude that that yeah, that that is totally unself conscious do and it ends with bah bah blah blah blah blah. But I'm and sometimes I listen to now and I go, did I really do that? The timing of it is perfect. It just fell into the groove, you know, it just became a groove thing. It was great. That's what I mean about the un self consciousness of that beginner effort. I made it out. They even included to holiday songs my dradal and must be Santa, Who's got a beard that's long and white comes around. We weren't going by any you know, market research or anything. We were kind of winging it, you know, having fun, including songs that we thought kids would enjoy singing. And that's what we did. I mean, I remember, you know, driving to a blues gig with a harmonica player and say, hey, you got to hear this project I'm working on. You know, it had that sort of enthusiasm attached to it, you know, where you're wanting to share it as broadly as possible, and so I kind of had a feeling, Wow, this could really be successful. You know. In those early days, this group of adults was somehow able to tap into what it feels like to be a kid. They captured the wonder and the insecurity that's most evident to me listening to the lyrics of I Wonder if I'm Growing. I Wonder if I'm growing. I wonder if I'm growing. My mom says, yes, I'm growing, but it's hard for me to see. My mom says, I remember playing nylon string guitar on that song, not my steel string acoustic. You can just feel that it's coming from a vulnerable place that Raphael is singing I Wonder if I'm growing in a genuine way, if I'm growing. I wonder if I'm growing. My mom seemed to touch people who hear it, you know, because the song goes from wondering if I'm growing too. Hey, I can reach the tap now for the very first time today. So the song goes somewhere. It takes you somewhere, and if you're a young child listening, I think it probably adds to the child's wonderment of growing. I Wonder if I'm Growing was the basic album Philosophy in Action, a beautiful song that both kids and parents would love that also respects children as they are, and I think I must be growing if he only knew how much he was about to grow in terms of his career, in terms of what he was going to be allowed to do as a person, speaking not just to thirty five people at a coffeehouse, but you know, to thirty people in an auditorium, or selling millions of records. It was November m Robbie Robertson in the Band held their farewell concert. Jimmy Carter won the presidency over Gerald Ford. The first Mega mouse Shark was discovered off the coast of Oahu, and Raffie released his first kids album single Bowre Songs for the Very Young Well Mr Son Son, Mr Golden Sun, We Shine down on Me, Mr Sun. Raffie was a one man record company. There was no released team behind him. He really did it all d I y, He licensed songs, he made the press, get himself designed promotional posters. He had one thousand albums pressed for its initial run. Well in time, I could afford some help, some stuff, so that was great. But while I was doing it, I had an adventure of play actually about it. Here I was I was pretending I was the delivery guy getting in my car and delivering albums, going to the train station and sending him by train across the country to a children's bookstore. Who was going to sell my albums? Wow? I was a delivery man. Wea you know, everyone on the committee chipped in to get their beloved album out into the world. Bonnie and Bert Simpson would even bring small record players two stores so they could play the album. Everyone loved that because nobody thought of that before. People would say, oh, who's what's that? Who's that? And they showed in the record and they sold really well. Right from the very beginning. Ralphie's bet paid off single Bore Songs for the Very Young was a hit right from the start. And then when the album was released, I was singing in nursery schools around Toronto and I'd take the album with me and copies of it for sale, and people were buying it in threes and fours to give his gifts. I couldn't leave it. I mean, the word was getting out. You know that this was a special album that you can have some with you because I shared with you. You have to to look back now and decipher why Singapore Songs was so successful. It's hard to point to one thing. Everything seemed to line up. The quality, production, the research, the beginner spirit. These were key ingredients. But there's also something to be said for Raphie and Ken's history with folk music in a lot of ways that set them up to make good music for kids in the mood, in the mood, and the folk element is there even in many of his own selections on these marvelous recordings that work very well with children. This is Dr Patricia she Hand Campbell. She's an ethno musicologist who studies children's music. Patricia says ralphie songs tell stories and a sound chill element of folk, and Raphie's music, just like the songs of his heroes Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, are also especially easy for kids to sing along to. And they don't reach a full octave, generally speaking, until they're about eight or nine. So many of the songs are within that smaller pitch range, within an octave, maybe only five pitches in distance from one another. And that was the place where were children's voices landed comfortably. Little upon the name there was in the mood, in the mood there was, and his name was with the overwhelming success of Singable Songs, Raffi and his team started working on the follow up album, More Singable Songs, came out in ninety seven, and it slapped two. It was time to take the show on the road. Hello, Hi, boys and girls. And I'll never forget the very first concert I had where we charged admission were buck when the very song I said, the more we get together, and by the time we got to the work together, the whole place was singing. I couldn't believe it, dep cried. I mean she was at the back of the hall, she cried, hearing everyone sing. And that was it. That's how it was gonna be from then on. Here's something that amazes me about Raffie, how easily he can hold the attention of an auditorium full of kids. I know firsthand how difficult that is, because I used to be a children's entertainer myself. At you see Berkeley's Public Science Center. I dress up like a wizard and teach kids about electricity or do improv about the human brain. It was so hard that I made the switch to stand up comedy and entertaining drunk adults. Instead bumping up and down in the little red Wagon bumping up and down. I keep thinking about this one Raffy concert video, in particular, whoa Dot to be My guard? Raffy is physically jumping up and down in his seat. The camera pans up to the balcony to show a pair of kids mimicking his movements. In fact, the entire concert hall of kids is bumping up and down in Unison's Hey, this wagon is still busted. The stick of the song is that the wagon keeps breaking down. By this point, the kids are losing their minds yelling out the names of tools Raffy could use to fix the wagon. Listen to those ideas. This place is full of mechanics today. And just when you think a riot is about to break out, if Raffy stalls one more minute, he comes in with a punch line. I wonder what I do is to fix the wagon? Raff He's gonna fix it with those sandwich Raffy's gonna fix it with this man's got time so that he can eat it up and down in my little red wagon. We had fun singing any songs together, and then I would meet the audience after the show, and that was kind of neat because kids with their parents would come up and the child would be trying to say something to me, and maybe it was taking their time, and the parents would be trying to hurry them along. Sometimes I'd say wait, let's just listen, please, and then the child would have time to say something. And kids would ask wonderful questions of me. In those days of cassettes, Raffie, how did you get out of my tape? They would say, well, it wasn't me who was in there in the first place. It was just my voice. That's what you're hearing. Oh that's Raffi reflects on these early days of success in his autobiography. They were thrilling, but they were also stressful. He recalls getting upset when dab, Bonnie and Bert were having too much fun in the process. Back then, he thought they had serious work to do. You know, I've had periods of my life where it's you know, I've had challenges to go through. You know, I'm no different than anybody else, personal challenges, professional challenges. At one point I said to myself, I keep falling up hill. Here's Burt. Rafi will spend a lot of time on the tiniest details of things, getting them exactly the way he wants them to be, and that's just the way he is. The perfectionism could be tiring sometimes sometimes I just go on and say, okay, well let's just pick one show, you know, and get on with that. But it's not like that. So if that's what he meant by taking himself seriously, you know he did. Ralphie's attention to detail and commitment to excellence to the point of perfection sometimes put work ahead of fun. He writes that he could be controlling and moody if things didn't go his way, and that he often put too much pressure on others, but especially on himself. The friends in our lives can be a huge support to us. A prayerful attitude can often help in many ways. You know. I'm just grateful to always return to a place of love and joy. Meanwhile, as Ralphie's family audiences kept growing, his dream of becoming a folk singer for adults started to fade. He kept some of his night gigs, but the dream started to feel too distant, so he decided to fully commit to his children's music career. Soon he would start selling out thousand seat venues and festivals from coast to coast. He'd make hit album after hit album. He'd be offered movie deals and endorsements. The path to superstardom was knocking on his door, but Raffie said no, No toys, no fast food deals, no corporate endorsements, no to the industry standard. Rafie was determined to forge his own path, and he was going to make it happen his way next time. On Finding Raffie, the primary goal of advertising and marketing is to train kids to become consumers. If I love my audience and if I respect for the people that they are, my young audience, how can I explain them? Why would I ever want to do commercial indorsements or you know, sell things to them based on my popularity? That would be right with it. Finding Raffie is a production in My Heart Radio and Fatherly in partnership with Rococo Punch. It's produced by Catherine Fendalosa, Meredith Hannig, and James Trout. Production assistance from Charlotte Livingston. Alex French is our story consultant. Our senior producer is Andrea Swahee. Emily Foreman is our editor. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Raphae's music is courtesy of Troubadour Music Special thanks to Kim Layton at Troubadour. Our. Executive producers are Jessica Albert and John Parotti at Rococo, punch, Ty Trimble, Mike Rothman and Jeff I's a Minute, Fatherly and Me Chris Garcia, thank you for listening. Okay, wonder if I'm growing. I'm wonder if I'm growing. You got me tearing up over here, ken, I can't believe it.

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Finding Raffi

Raffi Cavoukian is a magical musician. His songs, like “Baby Beluga” and “Down by the Bay,” have wor 
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