Children's music
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Children's music is music composed and performed for children. In European-influenced contexts this means music, usually songs, written specifically for a juvenile audience. The composers are usually adults. Children's music has historically held both entertainment and educational functions. Children's music is often designed to provide an entertaining means of teaching children about their culture, other cultures, good behavior, facts and skills. Many are folk songs, but there is a whole genre of educational music that has become increasingly popular.
The growth of the popular music publishing industry, associated with New York's Tin Pan Alley in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to the creation of a number of songs aimed at children. These included 'Ten little fingers and ten little toes' by Ira Shuster and Edward G. Nelson and 'School Days' (1907) by Gus Edwards and Will Cobb. Perhaps the best remembered now is "Teddy Bears' Picnic", with lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy in 1932 and the tune by British composer John William Bratton was from 1907.
Recordings for children were intertwined with recorded music for as long as it has existed as a medium. The first words ever recorded (in 1860 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville) was the first verse of the French folk/children's song "Au Clair de la Lune". In 1888, the first recorded discs (called "plates") offered for sale included Mother Goose nursery rhymes. The earliest record catalogues of several seminal figures in the recording industry such as Edison, Berliner, and Victor all contained separate children's sections.
Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s record companies continued to produce albums for children. Such companies as RCA Victor, Decca Records, Capitol Records, and Columbia Records (among others) published albums based on popular cartoons or nursery rhymes. Recordings based on Disney films and cartoons were released at that time by RCA Victor and Capitol Records, and beginning in the late 1950s by Disneyland Records and Buena Vista Records. Often the albums were read-alongs that contained booklets that children could follow along with. Many of the biggest names in theater, radio, and motion pictures were featured on these albums, such as: Bing Crosby, Harold Peary ("The Great Gildersleeve"), Orson Welles, Jeanette MacDonald, Roy Rogers, Fanny Brice, William Boyd ("Hopalong Cassidy"), Ingrid Bergman, Danny Kaye, and Fredric March.
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