Fathers, just like mothers, are keepers of folklore passed on to children. The tellers of jokes, riddles, and stories, they also sing lullabies to their babies and entertain older children with songs. These are just a few examples from the American Folklife Center’s Archive:
Perhaps the oldest lullaby we have is Lebanese and thought to be about an incident that occurred the 14th century. It tells the story of a kidnapped young girl who is later recovered by her parents. Made a servant caring for an infant, she sings of her sad story, a song that helps her family find her. The song is performed here by Nicholas Debs, in Arabic, recorded by Robert Cook, Robert Cornwall, and Lillian Stedman in Florida in 1940: “Ughniyah li al-Atfal.” Nicholas Debs immigrated to the United States in 1920.
For an English language example of a lullaby, here is John Lowry Goree, an African American from Houston, Texas. He sang this version of a familiar song, “All the Pretty Little Ponies” for John and Ruby Lomax in 1939.
There are a lot of songs sung for children that started out as something else. “Play party” songs were for parties or dances often organized by Churches to provide a chaperoned environment for young single adults to socialize. Many songs from those events became songs for young children, such as school or camp songs. An example is the “Crawdad,” which entered oral tradition in the American South and has many versions among different ethnic groups. This African American version is sung by Leroy Martin and a group of unidentified men, also for the Lomaxes in 1939.
In the American Folklife Center’s archives we find that not only did dads often sing funny songs, like “Crawdad,” they also told funny stories. This is a recording made by Stetson Kennedy of Evelio Andux telling a story in Spanish about “Miss Martinez Cockroach and Mr. Perez Mouse” in Ybor City, a Cuban settlement now part of Tampa, Florida, in 1939. The story is of an unlikely courtship with a tragic ending. Mr. Mouse dies suddenly after taking a sniff of a stew prepared by Miss Cockroach. Kennedy took the opportunity to record Evelia Andux, Mr. Andux’s 11 year-old daughter, telling the same story. Her version is a little different. Traditions passed on from father to child might be expected to be performed as taught or, as in the stories above, perhaps a good bit of leeway is allowed for the next generation to perform it their way.