Ed McCudy presents this collection of children's stories and songs through his animated delivery, sure to engage your little one's attention and encourage imagination. The songs consist only of McCudy's distinctive baritone voice contrasted against soft guitar in the background. This album is wonderful for keeping the kids entertained on car rides.

Your child will revel in this classic album, as McCurdy's storytelling and story-songs are captivating and fun. McCurdy's voice is perfect for storytelling, and he does a great job assigning voices to each character in the stories, from the sad little kitchen clock in The Clock That Told the Wrong Time, to the wispy wind and busy fast-talking bee in The Young Violet. McCurdy expertly raises his voice when a character is speaking, and lowers his tone for the small narrative asides, like "he said" and "she said" needed to keep the story going. Listeners will quickly and easily lose themselves in imagining the story and hear only the character's dialogue. The songs are equally entertaining in their simplicity - just a guitar played softly behind McCurdy's beautiful baritone voice. The songs are short, moderately slow, and contain direct rhymes, making them fun and easy to sing along with. Many of the songs also contain gentle humor that children will understand; for example, the final line in The Little Snail is, "Don't laugh at the snail because he is slow, with your house on your back, how fast would you go?"

The stories each have a moral to them, serving as an excellent take off point for important discussions with your child. The Scarecrow is a wonderful story about friendship and acceptance; the Spirit of Friendliness explains to the lonely scarecrow that if he wants to have friends, all he has to do is "feel friendly." She assures him that it will work for anyone, no matter what they look like. After that, no matter how bad, weird, or scary the farmer made the scarecrow look, the crows continued to come back and be his friend. The title of The Teakettle Who Wanted to Sing Like People also provides a brief synopsis of the song's plot, which is that people (or teakettles) can surprise others if given the opportunity to live up to their potential. In The Clock That Told the Wrong Time, the old Grandfather clock helped the little kitchen clock gain self confidence enough to always tell the time correctly and not be nervous when people watched him.

I listened to this album with my four-year-old niece, Emily. She sat quietly through most of the CD, just looking around the room while she listened to the story. During the songs, she would often start to bounce her legs to the beat, but return to being still (for the most part) and attentive as soon as the next story began. Her favorite was People and Horses, as she thought the horses' observations about people were funny. The brown horse was worried about people walking around on their hind legs all the time; the white horse thought it was silly that people took their shoes off before going to bed; and the black horse didn't understand why people added water to their oats and heated them up to make it 'gooey'! Emily looked over at her dog, Charlie, after that story and asked, "What does Charley think?" I suggested that Charley likes it when Emily's room is clean, but she didn't believe me. She figured he thinks about cookies instead.

--Audra

Ed McCurdy was a popular singer of romantic songs in 1940s, before moving in 1948, to Vancouver, B.C. where he hosted his own radio show for CBS Radio. His show was quite successful, and he was transferred to Toronto to star in a morning children's show and an adult evening show. During that time, McCurdy became friends with some of the guests on his show, such as Pete Seeger, Lena Horne, Josh White, Oscar Peterson, and Oscar Brand. He also developed a love for folk music and released his first folk album in 1949. The next year, McCurdy and his family moved to New York, where he went on to become one of the world's best-known folk singers.

McCurdy recorded many albums in the 1950s and 60s for Elektra Records and performed several times at the legendary Newport Folk Festival. His widely-covered anti-war classic, "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream," has been recorded in seventy-six languages. In 1989, school children on the East German side of the Berlin Wall sang "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" en masse as the wall was being dismantled.

Forced to retired in the late 1960s because of health problems, he was proud that two of his compositions, "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream," and "King's Highway," were recorded by his old friend Josh White, Jr. and became the official theme songs for the Peace Corps and VISTA.