Go In and Out the Window

A Review of the Illustrated Songbook Collection by Dan Fox

It is a great shame that these days, casual singing at home with your family is almost all the way out the door. Singing folksongs, hymns, and ditties while working around the house, or out in the garden, while out on walks or sitting around the piano, has been a common, unifying human experience for people throughout history. However, these days, it is rare enough to hear people sing anywhere at all, much less casually at home with no practice or forethought. This is a tragedy, because so much great joy can be found in singing. It can help pass the time while doing boring tasks. It can help express your excitement at the changing seasons on your morning walk. It can help you rock your fussy baby to sleep. But as this habit has been dwindling for years now, most of us in my generation don’t even know most of the standard American folksongs that our grandparents and great-grandparents would have known, because we simply did not grow up hearing them.

Hence, I was delighted to find a copy of a new-to-me book at a used bookstore; Go In and Out the Window, An Illustrated Songbook for Children. This book, edited by Dan Fox and published in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been a treasure trove of delightful folk songs and accompanying artwork that has enchanted my children for months. The book is made up of 61 famous folksongs, each with a simple piano accompaniment and a few beautiful pieces of art, needlework, or early photographs, with a very short paragraph telling us more about them. Some of the songs are familiar to most of us even now, like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or London Bridge. A very few are folk hymns like Amazing Grace and We Gather Together. A few I knew by name only (All The Pretty Horses) and some only by tune (Shenandoah). But many here are completely new to me, and have been quite fun to discover.

One of our family traditions is Friday Tea Time, at which my daughters and I have tea and treats together on our china dishes, read through a book together, and do some music and art appreciation. This book has been one of their favorite parts of Friday Tea Time ever since we found it. They love to page through it, taking in the beautiful art selections, choosing new songs every week along with favorites from past weeks. Jennie Jenkins, who is so picky about what she wears that she says she just wants to go bare!, caused great laughter and amusement, while All The Pretty Horses has become a beautiful little lullaby they sing to their animals.

The collection of songs included in this book is great. None of them are difficult, and for those that are unfamiliar, it is very easy to play through the melody on the piano and quickly learn it together. In fact, the piano parts are written simply enough that new piano students could use this book for lessons to add some fun variety to the repertoire of early lessons. The art is beautiful and well chosen, and introduces children to a wide variety of styles and artists. It is a very manageable sized book, both for playing at the piano and for looking through on the couch or at the table. And while it may not seem at first glance like a book that will capture little childrens’ attention, my daughters at ages 5 and 3 pull it off the shelf almost daily to look at it and sing the songs. Many of these songs were written for children, and thus you will probably only need to sing them a couple of times before you hear them sung back to you all around the house.

While this book is currently not in stock new, you can find it used at many online bookstores, including Amazon, Thriftbooks, Better World Books, and Abe books. It is an excellent book and well worth picking up and adding to your family’s collection.