This is a very convincing first monograph on the neglected topic of children's popular music, music made, recorded and broadcast expressly for a young audience. Unlike children's literature, which has been a recognised topic of scholarly enquiry for decades, children's popular music has not yet been afforded the attention it deserves. Maloy's book thus blazes a trail for further research in this unexplored area.
Positioning his study outside of psychology and music education, although partly influenced by these disciplines, Maloy follows a tried and tested Popular Music Studies methodology, interdisciplinary and structuralist. Examining the lyrics, music and visual identity of key songs and performers, some more famous than others (Woody Guthrie, Barry Louis Polisar, The Wiggles, David Gibb, etc.), he uncovers trends and counter-trends in the representation of race, gender, sexuality, nationhood and, of course, ‘youth’, in songs produced for children. Adapting the concept of ‘childness’, coined in 1997 by literary theorist Peter Hollindale, he shows that a dominant understanding of what constitutes suitable musical features and texts for children has emerged in the contemporary West, with innocence (including in a sexual sense), formal simplicity and separation from adulthood all informing song creation. In turn, the musical construction of childhood reveals societal beliefs, values, hopes and fears (pp. 9–10).
The focus of this book is on Anglophone Western countries, as good a start as any given the paucity of research in this field generally. Specifically, Maloy observes the production and marketing of children's popular music in the US and the UK from the 1940s to the present (2020), with his five main chapters detailing the music albums for children of Woody Guthrie (late 1930s to 1956); the BBC's Children's Choice radio programme (1953 to early 1980s); the American TV programme Sesame Street (1970s); the UK broadcast of TV programmes Bagpuss (1974, with repeats until 1987) and The Muppet Show (1976 onwards); and finally, in a more composite chapter, the last two decades of music production in the UK, the US and Australia, where ditigisation and drastic cuts to public funding have had dishearteningly similar effects.
Several key findings and arguments run through the study. The first is that, across this corpus, the majority of songs aimed at children follow the ‘Music Hall formula’ (pp. 10, 88, 102–3, 129–32, 168, 175). Just as the songs originally performed in British music halls were immediately accessible to guarantee sing-along participation, yet contained much double-entendre and wordplay, so children's songs tend to combine ‘high levels of childness’ musically, with surprisingly complex lyrics displaying ‘low degrees of childness’ (p. 10). Certainly, many children's songs contain short words, repetitive phrases, perfect rhymes and animal themes (pp. 82–3), but the traditional need to play these songs in a family environment also means that their lyrics are, more often than not, wordy and even worldly, able to entertain children and carers alike (p. 116). In addition to this, and again as in the music hall tradition, their music is typically composed with a high tempo and simplified melodies in the major key tonality (p. 102); with short melodic intervals between major thirds, perfect fourths and fifths (pp. 15 and 79); and with an average vocal range of 11 semitones (p. 83). These features combine to make children's popular music, generally speaking, eminently ‘singable’.
Yet it is when addressing the ideology behind the childness of songs that Maloy is most arresting, especially as little-known bridges and reciprocal influences between the US and UK music scenes emerge. Starting with Woody Guthrie, who wrote nearly 400 songs for children (more than his ‘adult’ output), Maloy shows that a substantial genre of post-war children's popular music was intended to fulfil ‘didactic and prosocial goals’ (p. 96), informed by socialist values and alternative models of pedagogy. For Guthrie, this included explicitly collaborating with children and crediting his daughter Cathy as co-author, until her tragic death aged only 4 (p. 39). Like Guthrie to an extent, although revealing a narrower ‘Christian, middle-class and white’ set of assumptions, the BBC conceptualised children in the 1950s as ‘rooted in wider intergenerational communities’ (p. 70). Pre-Beatles, and before television overhauled radio listeners’ habits, George Martin produced many records that were broadcast on Saturday morning during Children's Choice; these included the family favourite ‘Nellie the Elephant’, and all privileged humour and sound effects that encoded ‘the naughtiness of music hall’ (p. 84).
The progressive agenda set out by Guthrie centred around child and parent co-participation, and the development of emotional and political sensibilities. In the US from 1969 onwards, Sesame Street sought to adapt this ethos to its TV programmes, as did Bagpuss in the UK (1974). While such intentions were partly compromised in the US, as more and more children watched television alone in the 1970s, Bagpuss kept Guthrie's folk ideology alive in the UK thanks to the involvement of like-minded American émigrés (Alan Lomax and Peggy Seeger worked alongside Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner, p. 133). In contrast, as a Sesame Street spin-off, The Muppet Show proposed a less genteel, more anarchic form of entertainment which, paradoxically, found its spiritual and financial home in the UK as well. Produced and premiered there in 1976, before being franchised globally, The Muppet Show chimed with the UK brand of anti-authoritarian and nonsensical humour that The Goons and Monty Python had pioneered (p. 133). Although Maloy remains neutral throughout, it is clear that his personal preference lies with songs in the vein of the latter, which escape the constrictive nature of writing only for children (p. 128), and whose destructive brand of humour reveals the moral inconsistencies of the adult world (p. 124). Meanwhile, Maloy is alert to the problem of nostalgia for children's radio and TV programmes, discussing the decision by record producers to sideline the songs of convicted child molesters when re-issuing albums today (pp. 93 and 176).
Accordingly, and this is the key lesson to draw from this book, there may not be such a thing as a separate ‘children audience’ other than that theorised and invented by anxious adults – a point that unplanned playground pop hits illustrate regularly (Psy's ‘Gangnam Style’ in 2012). Conversely, ‘children's music’ remains a convenient shorthand for a complex music practice with its own values and stakeholders, pleasures and participants, ambitions and profit. Unpredictable though it is, children's popular music exists at the interface between ‘real’ children, discourse on children and the commodication of the two. Given that many parents now trust YouTube algorithms to produce appropriate material, letting their children ‘loose in walled-gardens of pre-selected videos’ (p. 195), it seems urgent to rekindle age-shared forms of socialisation through music. Maloy's final words are a welcome plea, then, for scholars to understand this practice more deeply, and for musicians to colour the ‘normative whiteness’ of childhood, as well as to queer the supposedly innocent, simple and separate identities of children (p. 197). My only regret with this book, then, is that Maloy the scholar does not illustrate his study with his own avatar, the children-entertainer Johnny and the Raindrops. As someone who actively practises what he preaches, he might have made his argument even more powerful. Nevertheless, this is still an important, thoroughly researched and highly valuable study, with plenty of further reading and encouragement for scholars. Children's popular music is now officially an academic ‘thing’, and high time it was too.
