That’s My Boy

So last night, as we were sitting at the dinner table playing Sequence, my middle son, Elijah, plopped himself down on the bench next to my oldest, Zack. After a few minutes of messing with the tiles (to the chorusses of “No, Elijah!” from the players), he began humming.

So last night, as we were sitting at the dinner table playing Sequence, my middle son, Elijah, plopped himself down on the bench next to my oldest, Zack. After a few minutes of messing with the tiles (to the chorusses of “No, Elijah!” from the players), he began humming.

I recognized the tune after a few bars. The allegro from Mozart’s Sonata in G, better known as “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”, or “A Little Night Music”. I thought it was pretty cool that he was humming a classical tune. Pretty soon, he saw me grinning, and cranked the humming up to full volume.

I got a musical kid. You know, my kids can do and be whatever they want, but it’s nice to hear a kid have such an ear. He was even in the correct key! (Yes, I have semi-perfect pitch: if I think about it, I can name the note. It takes me a few moments to figure out, though, based on reference points in my brain.)

He then seamlessly transitioned to “Do Re Mi”, from The Sound of Music.

This may not seem really funny, until you consider the meter of the first few bars: dotted quarter, eighth, dotted quarter, eighth. Identical first bar meter, but with different notes. He seamlessly transitioned from one to the other, and I began singing along to the medley. Terribly entertaining. The reason this is funny is because my kids hear me do this all the time with other songs that sound similar. Like “If You Chance to meet a frown” and the chorus from “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”:

If you chance to meet a frown, Do not let it stay, Turn that frown right upside down And smile that frown away.

Noone likes a frowny face, Change it to a smile! Make the world a better place by smiling all the while!

(Chorus) He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!

Oh, If you chance to meet a frown, Do not let it stay, Turn that frown right upside down (then a bit of a mixture) ’cause Santa Clause is coming to town.

My other kids are starting to do this, too. Taking a song and making up lyrics on-the-spot to try to be funny. They will learn later in life that, unfortunately, as funny as we think this is at home, this will brand them as an insufferable dork in high school, with redemption coming in the form of other musically-inclined kids in college.

Alas. Four or five years of suffering.

Anyway, you can have fun with all kinds of songs. I love song humor! One of the things that’s been fun is putting odd words at the end of hymns in the church hymnal, or pious popular songs. Like, “In the Bathtub”, or “In Bed”. Totally changes the meaning of the tune. “Amazing Grace in Bed”. “Praise to the Man In the Bathtub”. “Onward, Christian Soldiers In Bed”.

Sure, it’s not highbrow. But it’s fun.

9 thoughts on “That’s My Boy”

  1. Ah, the old “in bed” game,

    Ah, the old “in bed” game, though I’ve never heard it used with church hymns, only with Chinese Fortune cookies. I believe the scariest fortune I ever saw with that game was “An obedient child makes for a happy father.” You put the rest together…

    On a more musical note (rimshot), I will forever be grateful to my father for my musical upbringing. We lived overseas during most of my childhood, so we didn’t have access to mainstream popular music outside of the weekly broadcast of KC’s (Casey’s?) Top 40. But whatever my musical education lacked in New Kids and Roxette, it was more than compensated for by my father’s classical library.

    I remember him sitting me down and taking me, bar by bar, through Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. Explaining what Bach was doing with every phrase, why they fit together, that sort of thing. Totally blew my mind.

    Above all else, my father taught me that even with great works of music, it is far better to be able to *enjoy* them then to analyze them. I know a number of music majors who could have identified every triad or seventh chord (with inversions) of the Passacaglia, but who would never actually listen to it in their spare time. Not so for me, thanks to my dad.

    In his own words: “Music is the echo of the soul. You can get nothing out of music that wasn’t within you to begin with.”

    2. Private time

      “An obedient child makes for a happy father.”

      Are you a parent?

      You see, that even makes perfect sense with the “in bed” part on the end. If the kids are obeying you and have gone to bed themselves, you can be a happy father… and happy mother…

      Bit of a dangling participle, though.

      —
      Matthew P. Barnson

  2. Other musical kids…

    As far as music for my other kids?

    • For JJ, if it has a volume knob, it must always be turned to 11. And then played with as much enthusiasm as possible. He’s 2 🙂
    • For Sara, it should be quiet enough, right beside her head, so that she can listen with the lights off and pretend to us that she’s sleeping, when actually she’s listening to a book on CD, or listening to music while reading a book with a flashlight under her covers.
    • For Zach, it should involve headphones, also turned to 11. He will, in turn, sing the chorus every bit as loud as it sounds in his ears. The rest of us, however, do not have the background music. But heck, he doesn’t even need music. He used to make Kirill (a kid over whom we had guardianship for a while) laugh hard because he sang “Bob the Builder, Can We Fix It? Bob the Builder, YES WE CAN!” at the top of his lungs while, of all things… in the bathtub!

    —
    Matthew P. Barnson

    1. Then there’s the whistler

      Matt is a great whistler! Among his many other musical abilities, he likes to whistle. I discovered this way back when we were dating. That would be the summer of 1992.

      We lived 85 miles apart so our dates were once a month. This particular date, Matt took the train and I was to meet him at the train station (I think in Baltimore). The station was pretty big and we hadn’t set up a meeting place.

      I heard somebody whistling but I didn’t know who it was and didn’t pay any attention to it. A few minutes later the whistler approached me. He was whistling the tune to the Andy Griffith Show. To this day, when we’re someplace big and we’re separated, he will whistle that same tune so that I can find him!

      Very entertaining!–

      Christy

  3. Everyone’s a Star

    Joey (age 2.5) recently made up a song called “Everyone’s a Star”. The lyrics change each time he sings it, but they’re generally something like:

    Everyone’s a star Everyone’s the moon Everyone’s a tree

    So he’s not only a musician, he’s also a hippie.

    — Ben

    1. Singing for the Man

      James (4), on the other hand, sings (and “plays guitar”) to the song:

      Control yourself Control yourself I heard you got in trouble So I said to myself Control yourself

      It’s in a hard-rock style, believe it or not, even though he’s had no exposure to the genre. I don’t consider myself heavy-handed, but man, where do they come up with this stuff?

  4. Eek!

    Okay, Matt, we are now officially WAY WAY too much alike. I do the exact same thing you describe above with deliberately mixing up song lyrics or making up weird new lyrics (usually highly inappropriate ones) on the spot. Maybe I am your evil twin after all.

    Then again, maybe we should just blame Weird Al… but what you describe is a little more specific than that!

    I am vastly amused that your kidlets are picking up the same habits. Muahahah.

    1. What’s weird is…

      What’s weird is, I remember us disagreeing pretty strongly about a bunch of things when we were kids. We got along (that’s why we were friends) but you seemed to be pretty strongly in the “free spirit” camp while I was a bit button-down.

      Somewhere along the way, brains converged.

      Then again, that could be revisionist history biting me again…

      —
      Matthew P. Barnson

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