Children’s Folk Songs of America

Abstract

Teachers of general music are tasked with the challenge of locating high-quality repertoire for classroom use and to incorporate that repertoire into meaningful music learning encounters for children and youth. This task may become all the more difficult when seeking out repertoire of substance from traditional sources, finding songs of folk origin that truly reflect their original context, and celebrating the people who kept these musical traditions alive. This article highlights the lives and works of John Langstaff and Ruth Crawford Seeger, two American musicians, folklorists, and preservationists who tirelessly transcribed, compiled, and shared the substantive music of America’s folk traditions. Their legacies of collections of American folk music for use with children live on into present day, representing a great wealth of high quality, age-appropriate, and contextually appropriate folk literature that deserves to be kept alive in classrooms today and beyond.