This Parent's Choice Gold Award winning album is a warm and wonderfully varied collection of traditional and original children's songs. The songs are performed by some of America's finest folk and bluegrass artists; Jonathan Edwards, Cathy Fink, John McCutcheon, Larry Penn, and Phil and Naomi Rosenthal. Listeners will enjoy banjos ringing, guitars strumming, and voices raised in harmony, while taking a glorious ride on Grandmas Patchwork Quilt.

This recording has a wonderful mix of traditional children songs that your little one will already know and love to sing, and original folk songs that are destined to become favorites. Having a variety of folk singers offers new sounds and unique flavors to each of the old favorite songs. The fast picking banjo solo in Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah is downright impressive. Cathy Fink adds a knee slapping (literally!) tune to the end of Buffalo Gals; and John Edwards presents Three Blind Mice a capella. The lesser-known song, The Awful Hill, Daddy-Willie Trip, will be a fun new addition to your little one's song repertoire, with its upbeat tempo and fun rhymes. A Duck Named Earl is also sure to become a quick favorite through humor; the song tells about a duck that the singer thought was a boy, so he named it Earl, but found out later than Earl was a girl! Then a second duck came along and the singer "took no chances and named her Lady Luck" only to find out 'lady' was a boy! Humor also starts out You Can't Make the Turtle Come Out, as Cathy Fink tells the joke, "Why did the turtle cross the road?...to get to the Shell station," before breaking into the song with a trilling mandolin.

Even though some of the songs are likely to be new for your child, they may be more inclined to join in after hearing Down the Mountainside We Go, since it is sung by a peer, Naomi Rosenthal (Phil Rosenthal's daughter). Larry Penn sings There's a Hole in My Backyard, where each chorus round adds another detail to an ever-increasing sentence until he ends up with, "There's a germ on the speck, on the date, on the dime, in the purse, in the pocket, on the pants, on the boy, on the shovel, in the hole in my backyard." Little listeners can exercise their memory by trying to repeat the growing lines with Penn, or even thinking of additional details to add in another verse. I'm A Little Cookie is sung from the perspective of a different sweet - each with its own particularity; a cookie missing a piece, a tootsie roll with a twist, a chocolate bar with a bend, and so on. The song portrays an excellent message of acceptance and loving someone, or yourself, despite minor flaws. The title track, My Grandma's Patchwork Quilt portrays multiple messages for discussion with your child, including family preservation and embracing cultural diversity.

My four-year-old niece, Emily, kept this CD in my car for awhile, listening to it a few songs at a time over the course of a few weeks. One evening in October, we were carving pumpkins for Halloween, and Emily was directing me on what to make our jack-o-lantern look like. She clearly had a very specific idea in her head that she was trying to convey to me, and finally she said, "I want it to look like The Pumpkin Man from my CD! " If you listen to the song, you'll know why.

--Audra

Cathy Fink began her musical career in Canada in the early 1970s performing folk music in coffeehouses. As a singer, guitarist, banjo player and yodeler,she made her recording debut in 1975 with Donald Duck, with whom she toured with for five years and recorded three albums. In 1983 Fink began writing songs and performing in children's concerts with Marcy Marxer. The two have released several albums together, including Nobody Else Like Me, A Voice in the Wind and Changing Channels. Their CD Postcards won a Grammy nomination in 2003 for "Best Traditional Folk Album." After several Grammy nominations, they captured their first Grammy Award in 2004 for their children's album Bon Appetit and won their second in 2005 as producers and artists for cELLAbration: A Tribute to Ella Jenkins.

Larry Penn is a folk singer, songwriter, story teller, retired truck driver, toy maker, railroad buff, and Grandfather. He is the author of several well known and loved children's songs. His song, "Grandma's Patchwork Quilt", celebrates the cultural diversity of the United States and earned inclusion in Macmillian / MaGraw-Hill's Series - Reading and Language Arts in 1993.

Singer/songwriter, Johnathan Edwards' music career has been ongoing for more than four decades. He was heavily influenced by folk music as his career developed. Edwards is best known for his hits "Lay Around the Shanty" and "Sunshine", which reached the top five on the national charts, earning him a gold record in 1971.

John McCutcheon is an American folk music singer and master hammered dulcimer, who has produced over twenty-five albums since the 1970s. McCucheon can also play the guitar, banjo, autoharp, mountain dulcimer, fiddle, and Jew's harp.

Veteran folk/bluegrass musician Phil Rosenthal has received more than 20 awards from the Parent's Choice Foundation, the American Library Association, and the National Association of Parenting Publications for his previous recordings for children and families.