Songwriting for Kids Club: January 2008

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Here’s what’s in this month’s newsletter (click a chapter title to go straight to that chapter):

I Wrote a Hit Song! Contest Winner

January/February Songwriting Challenge

January/February Poll: Name That Tune!

I Wrote a Hit Song! Contest Winner

Congratulations to Joshua, age 10...Joshua wrote a hit song!

Joshua, from Plymouth, Minnesota, wrote a song called "Love of the Land" and you can view the lyrics at the I Wrote a Hit Song! webpage. I think you'll like it! Please stop by and leave a comment for Joshua to let him know how much you enjoyed his song!

January/February Songwriting Challenge: You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth!

It's always fun to write your own words for your songs, but sometimes it's fun to take the word's from someone else's mouth!

For instance, my friends Carter, Anthony, and I all love the poems of Sterling A. Brown, a poet from the early 1900s who wrote about jazz, blues, work songs, and old spirituals. We decided to put some music to his poem "Long Track Blues" and turn it into a song. We liked it so much that we recorded the song Long Track Blues and put it on my new CD!

January/February Songwriting Challenge:
Can you write music to someone else's poem?

Here are some things to think about:

Is there a poem that you particularly like? If not, try one of the poems below.
What is the mood of the poem? Is it sad? Happy? Silly? Scary? Try to match the mood of the music to the poem. Make it slow if the words are dreamy, fast if they are excited.
Are there any parts of the poem that you'd like to repeat? For instance, in the Edgar Allan Poe poem below, you could repeat the "tinkle, tinkle, tinkle" or "bells, bells, bells" in other parts of the song.
Always give credit where credit is due. I would never say "Long Track Blues" is MY song. I always say that Sterling A. Brown wrote the words and I helped write the music. That way Mr. Brown gets credit for the words he wrote, not me.

Here are some poems you can use if you don't have a favorite of your own. These are all from a book called Winter Poems.

I Heard a Bird Sing by Oliver Herford
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember:
"We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September,"
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.

from The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe
Hear the sledges with the bells--
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells--
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Skiing by Marchette Chute
I'm very good at skiing.
I have a kind of knack
For I can do it frontways
And also on my back.
And when I reach the bottom
I give a sudden flop
And dig myself in sideways
And that's the way I stop.

Here's a great place to visit if you're looking for poems. You can even look for poems by subject (for instance: poems about animals, or poems about feathers, or poems about family).