Roger Abrahams (1933–2017)

dispassionate and systematic, which is to say loveless. i've never understood this type of presentation; everything covered in paragraphs of scholarly exposition can be easily understood by simply recording the text and providing commentary to illuminate particulars. the author seems to have been part of the first wave of philly gentrification, which is pretty uncomfortable. my preferred way to read this is to flip until i find an indented block; the recorded material buried in the ever-shifting-and-converging sands of inane freudian jargon is charming and full of life… (mer)

Books of children's game songs are a challenge: They represent a tremendous amount of information in a tiny amount of space, because most of the games are just two or four or six lines long. So this thin little volume contains more than six hundred items, and (as a wild guess) maybe three thousand references.

It is a tremendous achievement, which I suspect will never be equaled. If you have an interest in children's folklore, it is vital. Unfortunately, it will leave you wanting more.

For starters, Roger D. Abrahams quotes only one text of each item, even if it's something like "Cinderella Dressed in Yellow" or "Miss Mary Mack" that has been collected dozens or hundreds of times. If Abrahams quotes other Cinderella verses, they are separate items; it is not clear that kids might take turns with "Cinderella dressed in yellow," then red, green, pink.... Also, no melodies are cited. And while Abrahams always quotes a text, and then lists books and page references for each rhyme, he does not cite which of the various sources he cites was the source of the text he quotes. (In this, he falls short of the practice of, say, Malcolm Laws, who created a somewhat-similar catalog of ballads.) And there is almost no background; Abrahams has a glossary of technical terms (e.g. "Hot peppers" making the rope twirl particularly quickly) and of characters mentioned in the pieces, but nothing about the contexts in which the rhymes arose.

These are significant weaknesses, especially the lack of clarity about which text he cites and the lack of background about the pieces. And, given that lines and couplets often "float" between these songs, he needs more cross-references, and clearer cross references (distinguishing cases where two items are "the same" and when they just share some words, or a character such as Charlie Chaplin or Shirley Temple). Which does not change the fact that this is a tremendous reference. If you are using one of the several dozen books Abrahams cites, and find in it a jump-rope rhyme and want to know if it has been found elsewhere, then Abrahams is the reference you need. It's just that you'll need to do a lot of work after finding the song in Abrahams.… (mer)