Gardening Songs from Erin Lee and Marci

Children’s musicians Erin Lee and Marci bring us the next of their regular posts with thematic recommendations for kid-friendly music, plus activities to make the songs an interactive experience for the whole family.

Look for Erin Lee and Marci here on the first Monday of each month, or visit their homepage, www.gottaplay.org.

I’ve created links to Amazon for the full albums (click the album image or name), plus links to Amazon MP3 downloads, when available, for those who want only the singles. (Click the song name.) I also have a widget after the jump that will let you preview most of the songs without leaving Mombian.

April Showers Bring May Flowers — right?

Well, we’ve had enough of the rain, but we love getting outside to see what’s blooming. Here are some of our favorite gardening tunes to get things growing!

“Seed in the Ground” (The Cat’s Pajamas, Goin’ Bananas)

If you got the sun and if you got the rain,
Plant a little seed in the old back lane.
You wish and you pray, you keep the weeds down.
You might find, oh, you might find, a root growing out from the seed in the ground.

Connie Kaldor’s lovely lesson about the parts of a plant gets a funky, groovy treatment from Philadelphia band The Cat’s Pajama’s. This super-cool percussive (and slightly hypnotic!) rendition will have you grabbing your bongos and drumming to your plants. Like a plant, each verse grows, adding vocal parts, jazzy harmonies and more lyrics til we’ve learned about the root, the stem, the shoot and the blossom. Go grab your bongos and play along!

“I Didn’t Know What I was Missing” (Alastair Moock and Maria Sangiolo) (Full album not yet released; free download of song here.)

Here’s something totally cool for you! Alastair Moock and Maria Sangiolo are growing … songs! Maria has a whole CD about gardening growing right now, and it’ll bloom sometime this summer. In the meantime, you can get a taste of what’s coming by listening to this bluesy ode to homegrown vegetables like tomatoes, green beans and carrots. Alastair and Maria make veggies sound so good, even the pickiest of eaters may be convinced to get gardening so they can try their own homegrown green beans! (And don’t forget to check back with Alastair and Maria later in the year when the CD is released!)

April Showers bring May …. skateboards?

“Waiting for It to Grow” (Erin Lee & Marci, Snowdance) is a song about some rather unusual gardening activity. The idea for this song was suggested to us by a young fan at a spring concert who had grown tired of songs about planting carrots and cabbages and wanted to plant a skateboard tree. Well, with an idea like that handed to us on a silver platter, how could we not write it? The names of the kids in the song are all names of children in the audience the day the song was created.

Get this song off the iPod and into your life: plant a seed, watch it grow, and sing this song to your plants!