last night i went over to my cousin’s house to eat dinner and hang out with his twin 3 and half year olds.. the kids know that I am in a band and always ask me to play guitar for them, so i brought one over.. i ended up playing accompaniment as they ran through a litany of childhood classics (if you’re happy and you know it, twinkle twinkle, happy birthday, the wheels on the bus, etc..) i didn’t really know how to play the songs (it turns out they are all a combination of 1, 4, and 5 chords), and didn’t remember most of the words, but they anchored the performance, singing multiple verses on every song..

then i got to thinking:

how do you teach your kids all the verses to those songs? because i don’t know anything past the first verse.. do you look it up on the internet? (it must be either that or buying a book or something).. those songs are the standards of childhood melody, but it strikes me as weird that they continue to be passed on.. am i going to teach my kids those songs? would i be a bad parent if i didn’t? what if i taught them some bob dylan instead? “like a rolling stone” has a bunch of verses that a lot of people forget about..

strange.