Ep. 209 Nursery Rhymes and Reasons

Sunshine and Stories Episode 209 Nursery Rhymes and Reason with Mary Lanni 

Episode Summary: 
Kate Compton chats with Mary Lanni, the Youth Literacy and Outreach Specialist from Douglas County Libraries. Mary shares insights from her upcoming book on nursery rhymes in storytime, exploring their historical roots, cultural implications, and why they matter for early literacy. They dive into questions about inclusivity, evolving trends, and practical tips for creating welcoming storytimes in today’s diverse communities. Tune in for a thoughtful conversation as a way to reflect on your own storytime offerings.  

Outline:  

00:19 - Meet Mary
01:22 - Why we need a closer look
02:51 - Common themes
07:25 - Why we sing nursery rhymes  
09:28 – New trends
14:25 – Resources  
14:14 - What's next?
21:54 - Closing  

Resources:  

CLEL
Everychildreadytoread.org
www.imaginationlibrarycolorado.org
www.maryrlanni.com
YouTube and Spotify (@MaryLanniReads)
Storytime Solidarity 

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CSL projects like this one are funded in part by the Grants to States program administered by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the Colorado State Library, Institute of Museum and Library Services, or the U.S. Government. 

Transcript

Sunshine & Stories podcast transcript for Episode 209 

[Music]  

[00:06]  

Kate B: Welcome to sunshine and stories.  

Kate C: The podcast that shines a light on big ideas and bright moments in Colorado's public and school libraries.  

Kate B: Brought to you by the library development team at the Colorado State Library.  

[00:19]  

Kate C: Hey, it's Kate C here, and today I'm excited to talk with Mary Lanni, the Youth Literacy and Outreach Specialist from Douglas County. 

I also know Mary from CLEL Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy as the 2025 Steering Committee chair. In getting to know Mary, I learned that she wears lots of different hats. So, Mary, tell us a little bit about your background and what keeps you busy. 

[00:46]  

Mary: Thanks for having me, Kate. I am, yes. So, I'm the Youth Literacy and Outreach Specialist at Douglas County Libraries. I've also been writing book reviews for School Library Journal and Children's Literature for about 10 years now. And I also do author interviews on my website and on my YouTube. And so, I feel like there's a lot of interrelated things, and I also write books. I've written one book and one that's in the works. So, a lot of sharing of knowledge in multiple capacities. 

[01:22] 

Kate C: That's one of the main reasons we're here today is to talk a little bit about a subject coming out in one of your new books, nursery rhymes in story time, which is perfect for all of our early literacy listeners. So why is there a need to examine nursery rhymes in story time? 

[01:40] 

Mary: That's a great question. So, a couple years ago, one of my colleagues approached me and said I've been getting a lot of questions about nursery rhymes and whether they're OK to use in story time, and can you just do a presentation for us about it? And I was like, sure, I'll just look this up. Surely there will be a lot of information about this that I can just pull together into a presentation. And there wasn't. And I was looking for a book that would tell me all the things that I wanted to know, and it didn't exist. And so that's part of why I ended up putting this book together. 

But especially today, there's just kind of a lot of reflection on the things that we're singing and teaching and reading in general. And nursery rhymes are a part of that because you grow up with nursery rhymes and you're used to hearing them. You hear them in horror movies, you read them in books. It's all part of pop culture. And so that becomes really embedded into society. And then if you really think about where these songs came from, makes you question, is this OK that we're still doing this? Because when it's a knee jerk reaction to sing it and then you realize where it came from, perhaps there might be another choice. 

[02:51]  

Kate C: And certainly here in the United States and Colorado, we're sharing mainly traditional English or western nursery rhymes. What are some of the common themes that you see in those story time rhymes? 

[03:06]  

Mary: So if you go back hundreds of years to when a lot of these rhymes that we sing today were originally put down in on paper, some of the themes you'll see are like taxation history, racism is in there a lot, especially the ones that came around in the 1800s in the United States, murder, illicit romance. So, if you think about when all of these were penned, you know, 1700s ish for a lot of them, a lot of people were not literate. 

They could only talk about things or sing about things. And as we know, when you sing about things, you remember them better. So, a lot of these came into songs that were not necessarily originally written for children. They were more written for people to communicate about their feelings about things. And there's a school of thought that a lot of these songs were written kind of to subvert the authority of people in charge, so they would have hidden meanings and ways that you're talking about the kings and queens of the time so that you wouldn't get burned at the stake or whatever, you know, so there's potential meaning to these songs beyond just being fun to sing with kids. 

[04:22] 

Kate C: Yes, I know I had a big ah ha or maybe cringe moment when I started thinking about the lyrics to Rockabye Baby or hearing the different meanings behind Ring Around the Rosie, and I'm sure there's a lot of others out there who had similar thoughts too.  

But Colorado is a diverse place with people from all over the world with different cultural backgrounds. Tell me what you learned about songs from around the globe. 

[04:50] 

Mary: Yeah, so colonialism is a big deal. It has influenced a lot of language and culture around the world. But every culture with a spoken language has some sort of song that goes with it. So that's a really cool feature about humanity that we lean into songs a lot. And so that helps us as storytellers to bring those songs into our community spaces by way of the people who are singing those songs. So, when you have people coming to a story time from an English-speaking country, often they will have a similar zeitgeist, if you will, of their songs that they know. And then when you have folks that come from a culture where perhaps Arabic is spoken primarily or Somalia is spoken primarily, there are different songs that come from the various cultures and so when you have a story time with people from different backgrounds, if you yourself don't speak those languages, that's a great opportunity to reach out to the people in your story time and invite them to be the leader to teach a song in your story time that then everyone can sing together because as for me growing up with English speaking songs, you know, I'll hear Itsy Bitsy Spider and I'm like, oh, I got it. I know the song. It's very comfortable. Everything's fine. And for someone who doesn't know that, it doesn't feel comfortable and familiar. So when you have the opportunity to share someone's comfort and familiar that's not yours, then you kind of all find the space together where you might be a little uncomfortable to begin with, and then you share this time together and then you have a little bit more comfort and understanding of each other’s cultures. 

And even in the United States, there's some French songs that are still sung, some Spanish songs that are still sung because of the movement of people over time and things like that. And those all have different backstories also, especially if you don't necessarily speak the language that you're just familiar with them. And then you're like, oh, that's an interesting song once you really learn what the words mean, so yeah. So, every culture around the world has their own music, has the songs that speak to that culture and the people within it and the things that they do, which is all relevant to different places in the world. So as our story times are becoming more globalized, bringing more of that music in can be really helpful. You also need to be careful that you know how to pronounce things correctly and that you know what everything means. So, when you're learning them, make sure it's from a source that you trust. 

[07:25]  

Kate C: I love the idea too that we know songs help people remember, so if you're trying to make a community of people feel more welcome, feel more comfortable sharing other languages. Why not share it in a song and then build that community that way? Which brings us to why would we sing nursery rhymes at all? What's the point, Mary? 

[07:46]  

Mary: There's a lot of points, as we talked about. So a lot of these story are nursery rhymes started, you know hundreds of years ago and really that they were written down hundreds of years ago they may have existed even before they were written down so they've been in our cultural vernacular for a long time and that makes it easy for a grandparent coming to story time with their little one to say oh I know this song from when I was a kid and so then you have this intergenerational connection when you're bringing these songs in that everyone else also learned as a kid and so you have this like great domino effective connection. 

And then also all of the things we know about Every Child Ready to Read that when singing is involved, you're slowing down the sounds and words you're participating in repetition, you are learning vocabulary. You are building that memory in a way that is different from just everyday speech. So, the nursery rhymes and the comfort that comes from them is something that is nostalgic and it wraps people up and they feel comfortable moving into the next thing. 

It's also, one of my colleagues once talked about a story time and why do we always sing the same songs over and over again. And she was like, it's like going to a rock concert. Like, yeah, you want to hear maybe like the newest thing from your favorite rock performer, but you really just want to hear the song that, you know, so you can sing along and like get involved. And so, story time is basically like a rock concert for kids, right. So you want to have songs that everybody knows because they all want to sing them and participate so. Yeah, so that's one of the things about nursery rhymes is that they have that universal connection not only just for the kids that are there, but also for the caregivers bringing them no matter what age they happen to be. 

[09:28]  

Kate C: I love that idea as we try to recruit more people into our profession. You want to be a rock star? Just come be a Children's Librarian. You see the awe in kids’ eyes when they see you out at the grocery store. I love that analogy. That's amazing. 

So tell me a little bit more about current nursery rhymes and what we're seeing now kind of current trends. 

[09:55] 

Mary: Yeah. So there's, as we've been reflecting about these story times or about nursery rhymes, what they mean. There's kind of been this schism a little bit in youth, youth literacy professionals, storytellers, things like that. Because we're wondering about what it is that it's OK to sing, what it is that it's not OK to sing. And then it just feels very scary and we just want to be like, I just don't want to do anything and you've got, there's a generation of people who also don't sing very much with their kids now because either they didn't get sung to a lot at home or they rely more on screens or technology for that kind of interaction with their kids. So, yeah, we're, we're in this transition phase and I think it's important that we're considering that because there are definitely people who are just tried and true, just want to stick with these nursery rhymes. And then there are people who are like, I don't, I don't know where I am. 

So in the age of Spotify and YouTube and the ability to record and disseminate information very quickly, there are a lot of children's musicians who are coming up and we see that in the in popular culture, there's people like Jim Gill or Miss Rachel or Cocomelon or Baby Shark, you know, or pink Fong, right? So you've got like all of these like really popular kid friendly songs, some of which are brand new and some of which are piggybacked. So what that means is that you're taking a tune that has existed for a long time that people know, and you're adding new words to it. One example is for Fraire Jacques, which people have known for many years, many decades. It's many generations and it is used for many, many songs. One of the things, one of the songs that is very old actually, Baa Baa Black Sheep, is one that is taking on different meaning in contemporary understanding. It was originally about the great custom, which is a tax on wool. That happened in 1280, a long time ago, very long time ago. And yet today, certain words of that song have different connotations. 

And so there's a school of thought that's like, oh, we can't, we can't sing that anymore because it has these double meanings. And then the other side is like, oh, we can't even sing the tune of that song anymore. What is tricky about that, though is it the same tune as the Alphabet Song, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. And so, then the question becomes like, is the tune the problem? Is the words the problem? How do you differentiate? And then there are songs that people definitely don't want to use anymore because of racial connotations that were actually definitely true when it was written. And then yet that's the tune that people can connect it to. 

The example here is 10 Little Indians. Which is not a great tune song to sing anymore shouldn't have been in the first place. And yet the tune is something that a lot of people know and a lot of people have piggybacked on using different words. And so, there's yeah. So there's this divide of do we just not sing the words anymore and then if that's the case, how do you coach people into what tune you're going to use or do you just not use it at all anymore and then what does that do to these other songs that maybe have been made using the same tune that are beneficial and all like welcoming and inclusive and you know, so there's it's a question, it's a big question and there isn't a very clear answer to that, but that's part of why there's all of these kind of newer songs that break away from all of that. They still have the early literacy benefits and they are still set to music, but they're lacking that generational nostalgia that comes from these songs that have existed for generations. So, I think there are pros and cons to each of them. And what maybe would be helpful is kind of coming up with a… we're entering into a phase of a new zeitgeist, a new collection of songs that will become like the foundation of our next generation of nursery rooms, if you will. But it's we're still in that kind of phase of discovery and figuring out exactly where that's going to go. 

[14:25]  

Kate: A really exciting time for us to get to be a part of that new innovation and discovery. And yet I hear when you are talking about people being afraid, I completely understand the context in a lot of our library spaces that people do feel fear around making the wrong move. And yet I do believe knowledge is a great combatant of fear. One of the reasons I love being a librarian and working with librarians- because we are a group of people. That will dig and get to the bottom of things. So, if you were a new story time facilitator or wanting just to audit what you're planning to make sure it's welcoming, inclusive, and not harmful to your participants, where would you look? What resources can help folks be more intentional? 

[15:19]  

Mary: So one thing is you want to kind of put on the shoes of the people who are coming to your story time and or other people you want to come to your story time. And that can become uncomfortable depending on who you are related to your community. But figuring out how they're going to see the songs you're singing, how they're going to experience the books that you're reading. If something in it just rubs you the wrong way, you can always look online. You know, you can do a search, there's a lot of librarians talking about this story. Time Solidarity is a great resource also and if you might find something there that will confirm your feelings. 

But also, you might not find anything. And in that case, you should listen to your instincts because they're generally right, even if you don't have any tangible proof at the moment. There are so, so many options. So even if there's a sign you're like, I really wanted to do this one, but I'm just getting this weird vibe about it, there are more options that will do the same thing that you're trying to do with that song. 

So as you're building your story times, think about the overall goal, the overall message that you're trying to send, whether that's through focusing on writing that week or if you're focusing on frogs or whatever it is that you have that kind of overarching goal and that way if something does bring an alarm bell. You can still pivot and reach the goal that you're trying to reach, even if it's not in that particular direction. 

[16:52] 

Kate: I think it can also be really important to build a culture of feedback. Making sure your participants are in dialogue with you around what’s working and not in a  storytime. That they are coming up after a storytime and saying, “oh I loved that book” or hey that one didn’t really represent my ancestors in a great light” or “hey, you’re pronouncing that word wrong.” Being open and appreciative of that feedback can be a good way to get more information too about what’s working.  I think one of my biggest takeaways having listened to you over the years at CLEL and different times is that some of us might not have that internal instinct. Maybe we did grow up with that song. Maybe you know, whatever reason our personal experience is, we don't get that little alarm. So having also a place to go and making it part of your practice to research what is the history of this song I’m bring that I'm choosing to sing? What might somebody walking into my space feel in hearing it? So again, so appreciative that you’re always bringing more knowledge to our Colorado library community. And So so thank you for that, but also tell me what's next? What more are you doing? What going to be happening for you?   

[18:13]  

Mary: Yeah. So just for any listener who's in that position that you're talking about, going to Storytime Solidarity is great because they have songs that you might want to sing and then they have better options that you could choose instead. So that's a really, really helpful tool. I also on my YouTube channel and also on my website, which I'll share with you for the show notes, I talk about a lot of those things also just in like short little videos. So, if you're interested in kind of diving into different things, you can do that. There's also a collection of songs that are quote, un-quote safe for storytime. You know, unless there's something that I don't know, based on the research that I have done, these are probably fine. So, if you're looking for just like just give me something that's OK, those are probably fine. So, there's that for you also.  

And one other sidebar is that as I was doing all of my research on this, I’m finding that there was this really pivotal book that was written in 1930, 1930? And she was the first person to really like kind of breakdown these nursery rhymes and what they mean. And there's not a whole lot of evidence that she actually picked this, you know, that she actually learned this from somewhere that maybe she was just like, oh, this is written around this time. This was sort of happening at this time. And I'm just going to put them together. So there's that also, especially with the older ones. So I'll definitely say that the ones from like the 1800s United States, there are a lot, a lot that are very deeply rooted in American racism and slavery. And so that is something to be really careful of if you feel like it's a like America kind of song, go to look and make sure, that that does not come from something that you don't necessarily want to be sharing in a story time that you want to welcome everyone to.  

So there's a little bit of grain of salt in there, but we know more about what happened in the 1800s than we do in like the 1700s. So there you go. 

And as far as next things for me, so my book on this subject will be coming out either later this year or early next, so watch for that. If you want to be updated about it, you can sign up for my Substack and you can do that for my website, which will also be in the show notes. And I'll keep everybody posted about how that goes. And I'm happy to talk with anyone about it. Also, if anyone wants to reach out to me, I'm happy to talk more about this subject. It's one that I've become very connected to and I like to share so. 

[20:43]  

Kate: So now that you've finished this book, what's next on your… What other trends and things are you seeing in story times that you're excited to dive into the research around?  

[20:52]  

Mary: Ummm, I have been doing a lot with Dolly Parton's Imagination Library because I'm the affiliate here in Douglas County for that and I've been working with the state representative for the Imagination Library and kind of connecting with local authors. There happened to be a lot of Colorado based authors that also have been selected for the Imagination Library. So, I received potentially some sort of something going on with that and spreading the word about that program and the early literacy in the process. 

And I'm not sure exactly what that looks like yet, but that's kind of the next thing on the horizon for me. 

[21:30]  

Kate C: I love it. Well, thank you, Mary, as always. You're always innovating in our field, pushing people forward, sharing your knowledge. I think any of us who've been in the story time children's world have always seen your name and have been excited to be in rooms with you and hear all of your thoughts. So, thank you for sharing them with Colorado and beyond, whoever's listening, and I appreciate your time. 

[21:54]  

Mary: Thanks so much, Kate. Have a good day.  

[21:56] 

Kate B: That's our sunshine and stories for today, y'all.  

 
Kieran: If you want to hear even more about what other Colorado folks are up to in their libraries, check out libraries. Org for all our past and future learning opportunities.  

 
Suzi: This podcast is offered at no cost to listeners thanks to the time, effort, and dedication of CSL Library Development Consultants, as well as our State Library colleagues and all our volunteer guests from across the field.  

 
Kate C: CSL projects like this one are funded in part by the Grants to States program, which is administered by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.  

 
Polly: The views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the Colorado State Library, Institute of Museum and Library Services, or the US government.  

 
All: Thanks! Thanks for joining us! We'll catch you next time!  

[22:46] 

Music