Dan Zanes and Raising Kids with the Right Musical Ethos

Took a walk this evening with Dan Zanes’ Parades and Panoramas.  My children were not with me.  Often placed in the kids sections of music stores both online and on the street, Dan Zanes does not belong there.  His records, Parades and Panoramas among them, while accessible to and appropriate for kids, are NOT children’s albums.  They are folk music for people of ALL ages, and folk music in the truest, purest sense of the word, drawing on musical, cultural, and historical strains from all over the world—from Africa to South America to the USA and beyond.  Dan Zanes is a hero and an inspiration— pure love and guts— to anyone who loves rock and roll and folk music.

Zanes first appeared on the musical radar screen as the leader of the Del Fuegos, a real plain old guitar, bass, and drums rock and roll band slashing and hammering their way through the 80s, when it was almost impossible to be a real plain old guitar, bass, and drums rock and roll band.  Their records are savage, raw, and desperate (“Nervous and Shaky” will set your teeth a-rattling in the first 8 bars), but  alas, as we know, not many folks bought records like this in the 80s and so the band, despite critical acclaim (and even some help from the likes of the Band’s Rick Danko!), fizzled and, uh, disbanded.  Zanes then moved to New York, recorded “Cool Down Time” in 1994—a wonderful but unnoticed rock and roll gem—and started a family. 

 

Now a father, he put together some folk bent sessions with friends and relations around town, which eventually gelled into a truly magical series of albums: Rocket Ship Beach, Family Dance, Night Time, House Party, etc.  These were marketed as “kids music,” and while this marketing strategy helped the records sell and helped Zanes resume life as a working musician, it didn’t really accurately describe what was afoot here.  Zanes was really making folk music, of which the late Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie would be very proud, and which was accessible and engaging not just to kids but to anyone and everyone.  The records combined American classics like “Wonderful World” and “The Sidewalks of New York” with international folk songs such as “Siyahamba” and “Jamaica Farewell” and gorgeous, hooky, and / or rocking originals such as “Night Owls,” and “House Party.”  This was really folk music— friendly, fun, upbeat, funny, danceable, singalongable— for everyone, including kids. 

 

Don’t get me wrong: good records directed specifically at kids should and do exist (please go buy a Justin Roberts record or the Bloodshot Records “Bottle Let Me Down” compilation classic immediately), but the term “Kids Music” mostly conjures up the kind of saccharin sweet sanitary drek so often pushed off on kids (Raffi, et. al.), which sane adults raised on rock and roll can't bear to listen to without upchucking. Sensing that he was somehow bridging this gap with his magical brand of all-ages accessible folk music, Zanes recorded a pair of albums not really too different in feel from the "kids" albums but marketed as "traditional" music-- an album of sailors' ballads and riverboat chanteys called Sea Songs, followed by Parades and Panoramas, a collection of songs pulled from Carl Sandburg’s iconic American Songbag.  Sandburg's Songbag is a collection of about 250 American Folk Songs transcribed by Sandburg for piano sketching the first 150 years of our country’s history in song, published in 1927.  This record is really Zanes’s finest achievement in my opinion. 

 

Someone (his wife, I believe) had given Zanes a battered copy of the Songbag as a present, and he (not reading music) had taken the book to the music teacher at his daughter’s school.  The music teacher recorded every one of the 250 songs into a cassette recorder for Zanes, who then culled 25 of his favorites and arranged them for his folk band to be put on Parades and Panoramas.  This is REAL music, about real lives and real people, performed by real musicians with real musical lives which EVERYONE in your house-- ages 0 to 100-- will dig deeply. The songs on Parades and Panoramas— American roots classics, all of them— are tuneful, the recording elegant and gorgeous, the playing and singing sublime, and the arrangements clever and engaging at all turns.  From the opening, longing plea of “Wanderin’” through the rocking trains rolling through “Railroad Bill” and "The Railroad Cars are a-Comin,'" on to the desperation of “Willie the Weeper,” past the Mexican air “Lo Que Digo,” and along the travels of “Across the Western Ocean” and “The Colorado Trail,” the album touches every folk music tradition in our country’s history, traces important parts of our history in ways poignant and personal, and seems to express every emotion in our collective psyche at some point or another.

 

Covering this breadth of material in ways this engaging to all listeners, it's simply not right to call it a kids album.  It's worth noting that one online reviewer felt that it wasn't a kids album because it includes songs with bawdy or darker lyrical themes, but I disagree.  While I don't think it's JUST for kids-- again it's a folk album for everyone-- I DO think its appropriate for kids.  Kids of all ages eat it up and don't get spooked or embarrassed by the songs on edgier topics because the songs about the noted potentially dodgy topics are presented with love, humor, honesty, naiveté, and innocence (my wife and I have kindergarten and 3^rd grade students who go crazy for the thing and it has played endlessly in my home and car with and without kids of varying sizes around for the last 10 years). Indeed, the songs, along with Zanes's and excerpts from Sandburg's notes about them, provide a real education about American history and life over the past 150 years that is likely to be much more insightful, informative, interesting, and exciting than what is presented to kids in school. But, again, it's not a kids album because grups will wanna put it on even when their kids are not around-- 10 year later, I still spin the thing endlessly meself, and my own rock and roll band has pulled several tunes off the record and presents them in settings and arrangements that have NOTHING to do with kids. 

 

Perhaps the only reason to classify this, and all of Zanes’s records, as “kids music” is that they are instructive to kids about what, at best, music and art in general can and should be: beautiful and edgy, old and new, funny and serious, and accessible to everyone, all at once.  This is an ethos and aesthetic worth passing on.

 

And so: the vision and courage Zanes shows in presenting such a collection, rough edges, grup themes, and all in the context of music for FAMILIES -- kids AND their parents-- is truly heroic. This is a record for the ages. Buy it for your kids, buy it for yourself, buy it for your parents and grandparents, buy it for the whole darn family, and for goodness sake, go see the Dan the Man and his Band perform if they get within a hundred miles of wherever you are.  This is a real American treat.