Singing Game - The Study of Singing Games

The Study of Singing Games

Singing games began to be recorded and studied seriously in the nineteenth century as part of the wider folklore movement. Joseph Strutt's Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Robert Chambers Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826), James Orchard Halliwell's The Nursery Rhymes of England (1842) and his Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales (1849), G. F. Northal's English Folk Rhymes (1892), all included collected singing games. However, the first studies to focus solely on this area were William Wells Newell's Games and Songs of American Children (1883) and Alice Gomme's The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1894-8), both considered landmark works in the serious study of the subject on respective sides of the Atlantic. Naturally, these works tended to have many of the faults associated with the folklore and folk song collecting of their eras, and have been criticised for a focus on rural society at the expense of the urban, and an obsession with recovering what were seen as disappearing 'authentic' and original verse, from adults, while disregarding contemporary practice by children. Some of these problems were rectified by work like that of Norman Douglas, who produced London Street Games in 1916, focusing on the urban working classes.

Perhaps still the most significant work in the field was that of Iona and Peter Opie, which departed from previous practice in Britain; following work by Dorothy Howard in America and Brian Sutton-Smith in New Zealand, they relied on detailed observation of children for their evidence resulting in their work on The Language and Lore of Schoolchildren (1959), Children's Games in Street and Playground (1969) and The Singing Game (1985). Their extensive studies refuted the idea that the traditions of singing games were disappearing in the face of social and media change, and instead suggested adaptation and development. Their work was highly influential and replicated from a number of locations, including America, where Herbert and Mary Knapp, produced One Potato, Two Potato: the Secret Education of American Children (1976) and Finland which saw Leea Virtanen's Children's Lore (1978). Wider anthropologically based studies include Helen Schwartzman's Transformations: The Anthropology of Children's Play (1978).

As the emphasis of investigations changed so did the methods of recording. Early folklorists like Lady Gomme, tended to provide written descriptions of games, lyrics and occasionally musical notation of tunes. In time complex symbols were developed to choreographed the movement within the games, but from the late 1970s there was increasing use of ethnographic film to record the actual practice of games, providing a record of the links between movement and music.