CASUAL
BOTTUM, J.
Casual HYMN AND HER My in-laws came up from Rio this year: grandparents and cousins and sisters and friends; Brazilians think it’s hardly worth leaving home unless they’ve gathered a pack of...
...Last week I tried to put on the Beatles, and my daughter crawled up in my lap, whispering “No, no” over and over again with all the sorrow of the ages in her troubled eyes...
...The other day I watched her marching up and down her room, crooning along while Maddy Prior sang for the thousandth time in her bell-like voice John Bunyan’s “Who Would True Valour See”: Hobgoblin nor foul Fiend Can daunt his Spirit...
...We got Cantigas de Roda, a recording of what sounds like a weary samba band forced to back up the neighborhood children’s choir...
...Lorena and I have quartered ourselves on them often enough to ban any complaint...
...In honor of Universal Right Number Four, for example, it offered “De Umbigo a Umbiguinho”—“ From Big Navel to Little Navel”—an upbeat ditty about prenatal feeding: Muito antes de nascer, Na barriga da mam?e, J? comia pra viver...
...And then there was a CD of piano solos—“carefully selected for children and other gentle souls”—so relentlessly calm that one wanted to break something with a sledgehammer the entire time it was on...
...But if the alternative is normal children’s music—Pocahontas or Can??o dos Direitos da Crian?a or songs “for children and other gentle souls”—I’ll just have to live with my stern little pilgrim...
...I have a friend in New York, Jim Nuechterlein, who defines his conservatism as “Change is bad,” but he’s a raging revolutionary next to Faith...
...Filled with the lyrics of John Bunyan, Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and other classic Protestant hymnists, the collection was released on CD a few years later as Sing Lustily & With Good Courage, and it’s fantastic...
...Faith Bottum” already has a Puritan ring we didn’t quite intend when we named her...
...Do all parents go through this...
...There was the soundtrack to Disney’s Pocahontas...
...as my mother points out, it sounds like a minor character in a Hawthorne story, the demure younger sister who one day kicks off her shoes because the streets of Salem are holy ground and begins to declaim the fieriest verses from the Book of Revelation...
...I do want my daughter to be bilingual, and my wife assures me Portuguese is at its best in weepy folk ballads about chivalrous highwaymen and strangely syncopated modern numbers about girls in skimpy bikinis strolling the beaches of Copacabana...
...according to one version of the legend, he was singing it as they hanged him for the botched raid on Harpers Ferry...
...That’s all right, you understand...
...She’s already learned to fear not what men say...
...Then Fancies flee away: He’ll fear not what Men say, He’ll labour Night and Day To be a Pilgrim...
...And so, every day from breakfast to dinner, we were treated to Brazilian children’s music...
...Or, in English: Much before being born, In the belly of mama, Already I ate to live...
...But this time they decided they would bring CDs for our almost 2-year-old daughter Faith...
...Do all children become immeasurably attached to one book, one video, one recording...
...We got a Portuguese musical adaptation of “The Musicians of Bremen”—a Grimm fairy tale, you’ll remember, that features a singing donkey, cat, dog, and rooster, all rendered with excruciating accuracy...
...And then we got Can??o dos Direitos da Crian?a, a multi-artist celebration of the U.N.’s 1990 Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child...
...Cheese” salada, bala, ou bacalhau: Vinha tudo pronto e mastigado No cord?o umbilical...
...He knows he at the End Shall Life inherit...
...In fact, you should come get my copy, for if I hear it again, I’ll scream...
...But if the price of bilingualism is Can??o dos Direitos da Crian?a— and I tremble for humanity when I remember those chirpy voices rhyming umbilical with bacalhau, the Portuguese word for “cod”—then Faith is going to grow up a monolinguist...
...I suppose it should worry me that this was the abolitionist John Brown’s favorite hymn...
...I think it came free with a Big Mac and large fries at McDonald’s...
...Fortunately, she was never much taken with the Brazilian CDs, and lately she’s found a new attachment...
...Cheese” salad, candy, or cod: All came ready and chewed Through the umbilical cord We’d had children’s recordings before, of course...
...J. BOTTUM...
...In 1988, in celebration of the 250th anniversary of John Wesley’s founding of Methodism, the BBC commissioned folksingers Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band to record some English chapel hymns in more or less their original 18thcentury gallery arrangements...
...You should get a copy...
...But you never realize just how inane children’s music is until you hear it in a foreign language...
...Brazilians think it’s hardly worth leaving home unless they’ve gathered a pack of twelve and plan to stay for two months...
Vol. 4 • March 1999 • No. 27
