Brent Davis (bdavis@bamanet.ua.edu), Center for Public Television, P.O. Box 870150, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487.
Permit me to add an item to the list. It will entertain your child and give you a sense of accomplishment (a priceless, rare thing for many parents): a ukulele.
I know what you're thinking. All you know about this instrument is that a suspicious man played one on Laugh-In. Tiny Tim did for the ukulele what Jimmy Swaggart did for evangelism. But I'm a convert. Zack, our two year-old, is delighted when I play "little guitar." He'll sing and dance for a half- hour or so as I strum along. This is a good thirty minutes for each of us: he's not watching TV or carrying the pots and pans out of the kitchen or unrolling toilet paper; I'm not fretting over bills or eating chips or reading in the newspaper that the market is down and violence is up.
All my adult life I've struggled to overcome the inherent flaw in the design of the guitar which has the player's four fingers taking on a superior force of six strings. (The thumb is used only for support.) You can't make music when you're outnumbered like that.
I was thinking small when our son was six months old. Much of my house had become miniaturized. Little shoes, little forks and spoons, a tiny ball cap that barely fit on the bedpost. Perhaps that accounts for why I was drawn to the ukulele in the music store. It looked like a guitar that had been left in the rain.
Zack had been intimidated by my guitar, an instrument from the Jurrassic Period, what with its big body, long neck, and tiny head. It looks rather small-brained and prehistoric, doesn't it? The ukulele is more Zack's size. The proportions are pleasing. He's not overwhelmed by it.
It's an easy instrument to learn. Four strings. Four fingers. No double-teaming. You're not getting ganged up on when you make a chord. You can learn a two-chord song in about thirty seconds. Even if you never get any further this might be enough. There's only about seven million two-chord songs. From "Sweet Betsy from Pike" to "Light My Fire" (Well, most of it at least).
In fact, I've found that anything more than two chords is wasted on most children. I've learned some flashy stuff with my left hand but still I'm the only one who's impressed. After I finish the challenging "Do You Know What It Means (To Miss New Orleans?) Zack might eagerly request "The Itsy Bitsy Spider," one of the lamest double-chorders I know.
Should you choose to try something more ambitious, you will soon be rewarded. You will play the guitar for perhaps a decade and twist your fingers like pretzels before you can make a decent augmented seventh chord. This is a combination of notes unlike the common major and minor chords that populate most songs. It is at once mysterious, sophisticated, engrossing and riveting. Strum it and you scream panache. Toss it with feigned abandon into a song and you create a cliffhanger that will cause those around you to cock their heads and stop in mid-sentence.
You can learn this augmented seventh chord in forty-five seconds on the ukulele. Guitar players will respond to this with weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, their hands so withered from chording their beast that they are unable to dial the local music store and ask about the price of a ukelele. (Nineteen dollars. And only the word "ukulele" is Hawaiian. It means "dancing flea," taken after the movement of the player's hand. The instrument is Portugese, and was taken to Hawaii by American cowboys who went there to work on ranches. The likes of Pecos Bill and Wyatt Earp are much more prominent in the ukulele's history than is Tiny Tim.)
I've engineered an augmented seventh chord into the children's standard "Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes," and I feel like Django Rhinehart everytime I play it.
I don't know much about music. I still wonder why there's no "H" chord following the G. But I was playing a song on the ukulele on the way home from the music store. (It's so small you can easily grab it when you're sitting at a red light.)
Sometimes we put on a show for company. Zack dances and sings while I play the uke. "He's learning so much about music," our friends say as Zack mimics my strumming.
Could be. The most important lesson he's learned, though, is how to be gentle. "Gentle, Zack," I said softly when he first picked up the uke. And since it's his size, and since he likes it when people are gentle with him, he quickly learned to treat it well.
So get a ukulele for your kid. If you learn "Love Me Tender" for him, he'll think you're better than Elvis. And maybe he'll even learn how to be tender himself.
Just like Pecos Bill. And Wyatt Earp.