These nursery rhymes will make you want to make a child listen to music

Article published on April 30, 2020

When I telecommute and my 2 year old daughter plays well at my feet (kidding, she is mostly on my lap, trying to type on the keyboard and hiding my eyes for me to come and play with her) (poor heart), I often play a playlists of nursery rhymes in the background.

It makes him happy to be able to move his hands on “turn, turn little mill”, and I enjoy listening to these songs of which I had completely forgotten 3/4 of the lyrics.

And then I think that even as a child it would not have been very serious if I had not remembered them, because in these days, listening a little better, I discovered much less pleasant stories of their melody.

Don’t cry, Jeanette

Before listening to this song again, I vaguely remembered the first phrase and the melody of “lalalala”. And then I took the time to listen to the lyrics, and I found them very disturbing.

The story is simple : a young girl, the famous Jeannette, refuses an arranged marriage for the sake of a prisoner named Pierre. But the latter must be hanged, so she asks Jeannette to be hanged with him.

The two lovers are therefore “hung” (it would almost give a nice side to the hanging) together. Great atmosphere.

It was a small ship

This nursery rhyme is cute, it’s exactly the kind of song I could play for my daughter as she wallows in the bathtub. It would also be really perfect if it didn’t talk about a young sailor being cast by the rest of the crew “to eat, hey hey”!

I can’t wait to explain cannibalism to my daughter.

She was a shepherdess

This popular rhyme, if we completely exclude its double meaning olé olé (in the 16th century, “letting go of the cheesy cat” meant having sex before marriage) barely perceptible to pure spirits who still wear diapers at night, is still quite violent!

There is talk of a shepherdess beating a kitten to death because the latter had the bad idea of ​​dipping her paw in the cheese her mistress had just made. I would like to ask, where did the measurement go?

And then what will I tell my daughter when, with tears in her eyes, she asks me “why did the kitten die? “And that a few hours later, she will come back to find out if” mom, can I kill the kitten too? “.

He was a small shoemaker

I guess I’ve never heard this song before it appeared in a randomly selected children’s nursery rhymes playlist on YouTube.

And frankly, I don’t think it will be missing in my youth, and most of all I believe it will not be missing in my daughter’s!

It tells the story of a shoemaker who, after buying leather in the village and having a few drinks, returns home to beat his wife, neither too little nor too little, “no more than necessary”. No comment.

Lark, beautiful lark

Then I realized that the purpose of this song was to teach the little ones the anatomy of birds (what, right?), But anyway, poor lark, she must have heard it pass …

Je trouve que certaines comptines ne sont pas tendres avec les animaux (la souris verte trempée dans l’huile, le chat frappé à coups de bâton etc.), et ce n’est pas ce que j’ai envie d’inculquer à ma girl.

Well, I know these nursery rhymes aren’t new, and they weren’t necessarily written for an audience with chaste ears.

On Franceinfo, Serge Hureau, a great specialist in the heritage of the song and its history, explained that “these songs were aimed both at parents and children” and “that they were sung in the evenings, when the whole family was gathered”.

But anyway, I wanted to talk about it (since it went through my head all day!)

Front page photo credit: cottonbro on Pexels