When children's life and labor were integrated with those of their elders, they mimicked them in their play, enacting scenes of child rearing, seasonal work, recreation, religious events, ill health and healing, aging, death, and burial. Bessie Jones (80252, Roots of the Blues, and 80278, Georgia Sea Island Songs), a black woman from a farming community in Georgia, has recounted playing at farmers-and- wives in her youth. Girls and boys played together with families of grass dolls made by the girls. They built miniature farms, gathered “crops” of seeds, and hitched up beetles to sardine cans to serve as horses drawing the crop to market. In “town” the “men” spent the money from the sale of the crop, while the “women” cared for the babies and scolded the children. On one occasion these playmates dug a fair-size grave for a play burial. Their mourning was interrupted just as they threw the first ceremonial shovel of earth over the child “corpse,” and they all got thrashings.
In like fashion, the folk singers Sarah Gunning and her brother James Garland, from a Kentucky mining community, recall playing miners-and-wives. The boys dug large “mine shafts” into the hillside and sometimes had accidental cave-ins. The girls brought lunch to the “miners” and tended the home and the children.
The potter Lanier Meaders, son of a Georgia potter, has evidence of such playing at being grown-ups in a photograph of himself and his siblings with a tableload of miniature pottery made on their father's wheel and fired in a miniature kiln that they had built themselves. Their uncle took a load of their ware to sell along with the crocks, jugs, and churns turned by their father for use in food storage, preparation, and preservation.
In the context of such play, the songs sung at work, church, and secular celebrations were rehearsed by the young. The elderly sometimes assisted these enactments with food and props, knowing that they were serious rehearsals for the labor and sex roles of adulthood. Children were the young ethnographers of their society, observing and judging critically the implications for culture stability and culture change in a changing world.
Old Mother Hippletoe: Rural and Urban Children's Songs
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Frog Went A-Courtin'
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Old Mother Hippletoe
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Robin Hood and the Peddler
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Bobby Halsey
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Round to Maryanne's
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Diez Perritos
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Little Sally Water
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Je Me Suis Mis-t-à Courir
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Jim Crack Corn
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Little Rooster
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Oh, Blue
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The Gray Goose
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Untitled fife tune w:clapping accompaniment
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Apple Tree Song
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Catfish
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Sally Died
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Ronald Mcdonald
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George Washington
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Bump, Bump, Bumpc
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Salome
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Zoodiac
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Zing-Zing-Zing
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Think
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Your Left
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Cheering Is My Game
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Hollywood Now Swingin':Dynomite
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All Hid
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I'm Runnin' on the River
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La Puerta esta Quebrada
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Ojibwa War Dance Song
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Chariot
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Dos Y Dos Son Cuartro
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B-A-Bay
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Today is Monday
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Mister Rabbit
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Old John the Rabbit
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Rabbit
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Rabbit in the Pea Patch
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Old Grandpaw Yet
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Roxie Anne
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Go To Sleep, Little Baby
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Dors, Dors, 'Tit Bebe
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Come Up, Horsey
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