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