Children's Song - Categories

Categories

Pioneers of the academic study of children’s culture Iona and Peter Opie divided children’s songs into those taught to children by adults, which when part of a traditional culture they saw as nursery rhymes, and those that children taught to each other, which formed part of the independent culture of childhood. A further use of the term is for songs written for the entertainment, or education, of children, usually in the modern era. In practice none of these categories is entirely discreet, since, for example, children often reuse and adapt nursery rhymes and many songs now considered as traditional were deliberately written by adults for commercial ends.

The Opies further divided nursery rhymes into a number of classes, including:

• Amusements (including action songs)
• Counting rhymes
• Lullabies
• Riddles

Playground or children’s street rhymes they sub-divided into two major groups, those associated with games and those that were entertainments, the second category including:

• Improper verses
• Jingles
• Joke rhymes
• Nonsense verse
• Macabre rhymes
• Popular songs
• Parodies
• Slogans
• Tongue-twisters

In addition since the advent of popular music publication in the nineteenth century a large number of songs have been produced for and often adopted by children. Many of these follow the form of nursery rhymes and children’s songs and have sometimes been adopted as such. They can be seen to have arisen from a number of sources including:

• Film
• Publishing
• Recording