My name’s Ben Bowen. I’m a husband, a father of two, and a musician. In February 2010 the opportunity came up to teach music to classes of preschool children. I try to approach risk with an attitude of “embracing failure,” so, not knowing quite what to expect, I grabbed my guitar and dove in headlong. The obvious first move was to turn to the music of my own childhood for inspiration: Raffi, Sharon Lois & Bram, The Goat with Bright Red Socks, but soon it became obvious that I needed to start sourcing new material and so, guided by friends’ recommendations and various parenting blogs, I started buying kids’ records.
After a number of false starts I ended up stumbling across a veritable “Holy Grail” of kids’ and folk music, the Seegers. The first discovery was Pete Seeger’s Birds, Beasts, Bugs, and Little Fishes, a reissue of two LPs from 1955. My family and I we were immediately drawn in by his warm rich voice, his meticulous playing, and songs we’d never heard before but that somehow seemed to awaken a long-dormant part of ourselves. I also found a 94-track album called American Folk Songs for Children, recorded by Mike and Peggy Seeger in 1978 which was a companion to a book written by their mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, in 1948. For reasons I couldn’t quite explain, these records had a profound effect on me, and the songs began to work their way into both our home life and my teaching.
See, once upon a time, music was imbued with our collective story. We handed down traditional songs and tales from generation to generation, and even in the very act of that transmission we could sense the history of ourselves, of our ancestors, of old ways of life. More than that, though, folk was the sort of music you didn’t passively listen to on record but was instead the type you got together and sang with your friends and neighbours in your living rooms and kitchens, smiling into one another’s faces as voices blended together and social bonds were strengthened through shared song and common narrative.
Last year I started singing these songs in public in front of audiences. In September I opened for Fred Penner. Shortly thereafter, it seemed like a reasonable next step to try to record some of my favourites. In December, with my sister and brother-in-law in tow, I went into the studio and over the course of a single day recorded ten songs, five of which now appear on the Bumblebee EP.
These songs resonate in me like church bells, cutting through the din and complication of modern life with their simple beauty and often playful lyrics. This EP is the first of what I hope to be many recordings of this kind of music; I hope you find my love for it infectious, and that maybe it encourages you to go out and find more of these rich socio-cultural treasures yourself.
The Bumblebee EP is available on iTunes, CDBaby, and emusic, and can be previewed (so-to-speak) in its entirety at www.benbowen.ca/epk.htm.
Win it!: One lucky Stuff Parents Need reader is going to score the entire album!