If you are reading this article, you probably also have a small child or two running around and causing havoc. If, like me, you’re wondering where all the traditional nursery rhymes have gone, I’m here to remedy the situation!
Do you remember traditional nursery rhymes from your kindergarten years like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Old MacDonald Had A Farm, Incy Wincy/Itsy Witsy Spider, ABC, etc.? I suppose you remember them sung a certain way, with different emphasis and emphasis on certain key words. You can’t forget the melodies either – impossible! In fact, many melodies are reused in multiple nursery rhymes, such as Twinkle Twinkle, which has the same melody as the A, B, C Song and Baa Baa Black Sheep.
So you can imagine my horror when recently when I was trying to entertain my youngest daughter (15 months) with some videos on YouTube and almost None of these aforementioned children’s songs were quite as I remembered them! Was my bad memory to blame here?
I wanted to show my baby all the nursery rhymes he had grown up with, just like my own mother/father and theirs too. I was surprised (or should I say “shocked”?) to see how disastrously bad the vast majority of the videos online were. I mean they were really horrible! At best some were genuinely laugh-out-loud but for all the wrong reasons(!) and at worst some were scary and maybe not even suitable for small children. Perhaps the ratio of good:poor quality was around 1:40! I also noticed that most of the nursery rhyme videos on YouTube had incredibly long intros: 20, 30, or even more seconds of intro material, promos, and other irrelevant material before getting into the theme song. You probably don’t need to tell you, dear father, that even just 20 seconds can seem like an incredibly long time when you have a squirming and slightly bored baby in your lap.
The websites and animations are not only mostly incredibly low quality, but the songs and lyrics themselves were often incorrect, as the singer/company’s first language was often not English. Where did all the real Are the nursery rhymes gone? I was wondering. There were very few resources online that reflected my childhood memories. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” had now become “Dwingle Dwingle” and Baa Baa Black Sheep’s little boy now lived in the lane (whatever that means!)
It is important that we do not lose our traditional songs due to the constant technological changes that allow anyone to upload the material they want to the Internet. It is important that high standards are upheld and that we convey our playground songs accurately. I urge you to watch some of the nursery rhyme videos to see just how awful they have become. You’ll laugh at some and be embarrassed at others, but after the initial laughter has died down, you’ll also feel the sadness of your childhood memories fade away.
Unfortunately, the number of views a video has received or where it appears in search results does not provide any indication of quality. So how do you spot the good stuff and ignore the bad? My recommendations are the following:
- Go to YouTube (not Google) to search
- Use the full name of the nursery rhyme, ie “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is better than “Twinkle Twinkle” and use voice marks around the title.
- Adding the word “British” or “English” can really help
- Click search options and under “Features” (far right), click High Definition.