Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child - Woody Guthrie

This sounds like someone followed Woody around his house and taped him as he made up songs for his kids on the spur of the moment. Ultra simple music with mostly nonsense-y lyrics and a lot of melody sharing going on - "Swimmy swim" has more or less the same tune as "Goodnight little darlin" and "I want my milk" has exactly the same tune as "Vigilante Man" (which isn't on here, obviously).

I absolutely love this! Myself and Niamh are constantly singing makey-uppy tunes for our own kids, and it's amazing to hear Woody Guthrie doing the same thing. It's charming and artless and really makes me smile. Heather loves it too, last night she had a sore throat and was very whingey, but dancing her around to this made her chuckle - and this morning we were singing "Swimmy swim" together all the way to her creche in the car with her squeaking with delight and pretending to splash the imaginary water.

Tchaikovsky discovers America

It's 1891, Tchaikovsky is New York about to conduct a concert in Carnegie Hall (which is still under construction). He gets nervous about the show, and gets the train to Niagra Falls to chill out for a bit, accompanied by the family (Russian immigrant parents, American kids) he's staying with. The parents and kids get separated in the train station, and Tchaikovsky shoots the breeze with the kids on the journey - they discuss with him their Dad's plan to return to Russia, he waxes lyrical about the place and tells the kids snippets of the plot from his ballets. The story is not all that dramatic or informative, and Tchaikovsky himself sounds like he's from Waterford rather than Russia, but it's not bad, and the plot snippet from Swan Lake is very well done.

The music, which plays in the background, is brilliant. If you don't like classical music I'm not going to convince you here, but the music on this is catchy, dramatic and accessible and really very enjoyable - there's even a little piano ragtime version of a Tchaikovsky tune.

Beethoven Lives Upstairs is still my favourite Classical Kids CD I think, mostly because the story is better, but this is one of the best of the rest in the series.

Wheels on the Bus

"25 favourite pre-school songs" from BBC Audio.

This pretty much epitomises all that is wrong with bad children's "music". Appalling.

Easy - Secret Agent 23 Skidoo

The kids were dancing as soon as I put this on for the first time last night. Jurassic 5-ish hip-hop with kid-oriented rhymes. There's stories like "The last dragon", some really cool descriptive child's-eye view stuff, and some positive-message tunes. "Message" songs often make me a bit squirmy - it's not actually true that you can be what you want to be if you only believe and work hard, now is it? - but these are mostly great:

"What ya gotta be?"
"I GOTTA BE ME!"

The music is really good too, with pucks of imagination and instruments you don't often hear in a hip-hop setting like harps and banjos. The guy's little girl is rapping on here too, and doing a fine job of it.

Thumbs up! I dig it!

Mother Goose Remembers

Nursery rhyme CD with 40-something English nursery rhymes like Little Boy Blue, Hickory Dickory Dock, Humpty Dumpty, Three Blind Mice etc. Acoustic, with whistles and a guitar and an occasional accordion or fiddle or flute. Not as lively as I was hoping, but pretty good, and has some cool rhymes I hadn't heard before like "Peddler's song" and "Snow, snow faster".

Putumayo Kids presents African Dreamland

A lullaby CD containing music from Africa. The music's good, and the vibe is quiet and sleepy, but I haven't found this to be any good at putting my kids to sleep - I think the beat isn't steady enough, perhaps.

Click here for other lullaby albums from Putumayo Kids and elsewhere that actually do work

Wiggleworms Love You

Acoustic kids songs from the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. Includes English nursery rhymes like "Pease porridge hot", American traditional kids songs like "Polly Wolly Doodle" and "Oh Susannah" and other stuff in a similar vein, including a few songs with a bit of Spanish and French in them.

The nursery rhymes are the US versions, so, for example, in "Wheels on the Bus" the punchline is "all through the town" rather than "all day long". The English versions are so familiar to me that I find the different words oddly jarring, but that aside this is very good. Simple songs simply and effectively performed, à la Raffi. Recommended.