Family Singing Repertoire 1: Favorite Munchkin Songs

Singing "The Lord's My Shepherd" with some of the munchkins, circa 2005.

Somehow I recently realized that I've never really done a lot of blogging about music, which has always been a big part of our family's life. I thought it might be fun to collect some of our musical repertoire here on the blog, especially since we have a tendency to forget and then re-discover some of the songs over the course of the years.

I'd like to start with a list of songs that were favorites among our kids when they were munchkins. It's hard to remember who exactly liked which songs, but I especially remember a number of Ria's favorites from when she was 3-6 years old or so, since I made a list at one point.

Of course everyone enjoyed the classic songs of various sorts, such as:

I'm a Little Teapot
Hickory Dickory Dock
Hey Diddle Diddle
Jack and Jill
Mary Had a Little Lamb
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
I've Been Working on the Railroad
God Bless America
You're a Grand Old Flag

A great place to learn many of these classics is Wee Sing: Nursery Rhymes and Lullabies and Wee Sing: Children's Songs and Fingerplays. We also, especially enjoyed lots of songs from three other Wee Sing albums: America, Around the World and Sing-Alongs.

The kids also learned to sing the basic Ave Maria chant when they were very young (I remember Ria singing it at age 3) as we used that as part of bedtime prayers.


We also picked up a number of more quirky favorites from a variety of sources (and we never necessarily learned all the words to all of these, just enjoyed them a lot):

Powder Milk Biscuits (from the "Prairie Home Companion" radio show)
Pretty Irish Girl (from Darby O'Gill and the Little People)We're Busy Doing Nothing (from the musical, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)
Under the Bamboo Tree (from Meet Me in St. Louis)
The Codfish Ball (from a Shirley Temple movie - we had a Shirley Temple sing-along video at one point)
Paper Moon (from Natalie Cole's Unforgettable)
Istanbul, not Constantinople (from They Might be Giants' Flood)
In the Highways (from O Brother Where Art Thou)
The Lord's My Shepherd (this recording is of the same tune, but sounds very little like the way we sang it, which was more as a folk tune with a guitar)
Edelweiss, Do a Deer, My Favorite Things, etc. (from Sound of Music)

And we need a special category for Irish music:
John and I kind of dated over Irish music and it naturally became part of the family from the beginning, especially since our home town of Milwaukee annually hosts the largest Irish Festival in the world. Here are some of the Irish songs that the kids enjoyed when they were little:

All God's Creatures Got a Place in the Choir
Waltzing with Bears
Rattlin' Bog
Rambles of Spring
Big Ship Sailing (couldn't find a recording, only the lyrics) 

Favorite Rounds for Munchkins:

Three Blind Mice
Row, Row, Row Your Boat
Frere Jacque
Father I Adore You
Down by the Station, Early in the Morning
Cookaburra
Love, Love, Love, Love or Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose (we sing both versions, sometimes mixed together!)
White Coral Bells


And so much more that's hard to remember. Lots of Christmas songs and patriotic songs and Church songs and such too. I'll see what I can keep coming up with.