Cheeky Songs Travel

A day or two ago...I uploaded to YouTube...a video called "Guyana School Yard Songs".
It was of one of the three segments of a program I delivered recently...at a large
multi-cultural gathering. The first part was the song "Pretty Brown"...already posted
to this Blog. The third was a serious song about the journey North of an immigrant to
Canada from Guyana. Singing the school yard songs in the middle...was an idea that came to me late on...I'd never done these songs in public before...but I thought it might offer some relief from the seriousness of the song I wanted to close with. I also thought...it might offer some common ground...between myself and my audiences...the majority of whom were Guyanese or Caribbean people. It turned out the way I thought it would...with the audience joining in the singing of the last song...without my asking them to...but simply because they knew it too...from their younger years in Guyana. I was wondering after I made the video...why 3 of the 4 songs sung...were in Guyana dialect...and why the fourth one was in English with no sign of a dialect. This
morning I got the answer to the question in my mind...in a comment from someone in the
U.S.A...who said her father used to sing this song to her when she was little...
indicating that this song didn't likely originate in Guyana...but instead...came from
somewhere north of there. Just illustrates once again...that children have a nose...
or should I say a mouth...for cheeky songs...wherever they may come from...songs
have a way of travelling far...and there's something to be learnt every day........
................Quester.