On April 24, 2024, three legendary CMN artists offered a Zoom workshop focused on the power of music to help children process challenging emotions and upsetting events. They shared songs written especially for hard times and told powerful stories about making connections through music even in devastating circumstances . . . and with skeptical audiences. Many thanks to Sarah and Ruth for transcribing and condensing the workshop for this article, which presents highlights of the songs and insights offered by the three presenters as well as thoughtful responses from other workshop participants.
What do I do when my sister is crying?
What do I do? I don’t know what to say.
You take your sister in your arms and you hug her.
You take your sister in your arms and you love her.
What do I do when the whole world is crying?
What do I do? I don’t know what to say.
You take the world into your heart and you love us.
You take the world into your heart and you love us.
Sarah Pirtle: What are supportive songs for young people in these challenging times? Those verses of Ruth [Pelham]’s longer song, “What Do I Do?” really help bring us into the topic. I’ve been in a group of people who were in grief, and after singing this song, they felt immensely comforted.
CMN formed initially from a tremendous concern for how children were affected by events in the world and how intimate connections through music support children. Songs can zoom in on what’s important to talk about. Stuart says songs can help young people build capacity.
Jill Person, whose life mission was recording meaningful music as owner of A Gentle Wind, said to me once: “Kids are coming into school more upset and more vulnerable than ever before. But teachers have less time for everything including addressing emotional issues.” She continued, “Yet I’ve seen how introducing a song—which can take three minutes—can make a difference in new understanding.”
How can we in CMN offer songs that matter to young people and are singable, supportive, and sensitive? We want to engage CMN both in finding and writing singable songs that build connection and strength through singing together.
We’re talking about a way of being close to children that’s different from relating just as a performer. It matters that everyone’s invited to sing along. As Ruth says, “It’s the heart and intention you bring and who you are in relating to the children that helps the most. When we sing and write songs with children, we get to love them in the most simple way.”
I want to mention CMN member Pam Felber. During the October 2023 CMN conference, Pam wrote in the chat a message that deserved a response. The conference happened at the time of a shooting in Lewiston, Maine, at a bowling alley, and Pam wrote that this was a place where her family had gone. I wrote back to her with concern then phoned her later to follow up. This started a series of conversations that created the seeds for offering this direction to CMN. I knew Stuart and Ruth would be interested, and what follows are sections of our workshop for CMN.
One time I was starting a songwriting residency in Russell, Massachusetts. When I arrived, I learned that a huge fire had recently spread in town after a railroad repair worker accidentally lit a spark. Instead of admitting it and getting help, he left the scene and let it burn. So, part of the crisis was learning about his behavior. Everyone was shook up. But they also talked about how the whole town rallied. I asked myself, what did they want to hear now? What’s the honest reassurance that they wanted?
Here’s the song we wrote:
Help comes when you need it.
Help comes when you call.
Help comes when you’re hurt.
Help comes when you fall.
Look around. People care. Yes, people will be there.
I brought it to a different school, and they added a new verse:
I will stick by you, you can count on me.
We make a circle that is strong.
If you are hurt, we’ll listen and help.
We make a circle that is strong.
Songs can give important reminders like that. Debbie Rubenzahl, a family counselor in Greenfield, Massachusetts, said, “Children need a nonthreatening way to talk about feelings and values. Music is an ideal vehicle. It appeals to their love of fun and at same time speaks to real-life skills.”
Stuart Stotts: I’ve been singing with kids for many, many years all over the place. I’ve been incredibly lucky to get to do that. CMN members who do this work, we’ve all got songs to get us started. Any time you want to connect to kids, you need, I believe, to begin with a sense of belonging and relationship and caring. So, this is a little song that Tom Pease and I have used. We wrote verses to this song with kids, but basically now it’s come down to the chorus, which is a zipper song.
Come on in, come on in. Got a little room for you.
Come on in. Come on in. Got a little room for you.
No matter where you come from. No matter what you do.
Come on in. Come on in. Got a little room for you.
In other verses you can say, “got a little snack for you,” or “got a little song for you.”
Schools are different than they were thirty-five years ago when I started doing this. You have, I think, greater needs emotionally. A sense of connection is harder to come by. I think that makes the work matter even more.
Bess Lomax had this great story about that. She felt like the songs children learn help build a sort of emotional immune system. I believe they had to put a dog down in their family. Later on, she hears the kids outside singing “Go tell Aunt Rhody the old gray goose is dead,” to help them process this experience. (Read the story in “Yeast to Make the Bread Rise,” Bess Lomax Hawes’s Keynote Address to CMN’s 1999 National Gathering, published in PIO! Fall 2022.)
I think it’s important to focus on songs that are singable together. Pete Seeger said something that I love: when you watch a virtuoso, you think, wow, look what they can do. But when you sing together, you go—look what we can do. And that’s what we’re interested in.
Ruth Pelham: Our music is so incredibly needed now. It was needed when we started CMN way back in the ’80s, and oh my goodness! Looking at everyone here in this online workshop—we are all bright lights. A situation that I have found myself in, given the changes that happen in the world, is that there are songs that I just love to sing from the bottom of my heart. One of them is this:
Love is all around. Love is all around.
Then we add verses:
The Earth is our treasure. How lucky are we?
Love is all around.
Home to billions of people just like you and me.
Love is all around.
What I have found tricky these days is to sing a song like “Love is All Around” when the world is the way it is. People can look at you and say, “Are you for real? What kind of song is that? You’re an idealist. Are you in touch with anything?” How do we go about singing songs like that when the world is so much more visibly bombarded? So, I would say that now is the most important time to sing these songs and to figure out how, in presenting them, we put them in a context of acknowledging the incredible challenges that we’re facing and the hate in the world, and the contradictions and the static, all of that. But keep singing these songs.
Sarah: I really agree with you, Ruth. Here’s what happened for me when I was listening on the car radio, and I heard the news about the shootings at the Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut. I stopped my car and tried to figure out what could I write that in any way might be helpful. Then a few weeks later, Nancy Hershatter, a longtime CMN member, actually brought many of us from CMN to perform in Newtown. It was a large gathering in the gym where the families from all the dance and music classes, like the ones that Nancy runs, were assembled. When I did this song that night, suddenly there was a hush. The families knew without my saying so that it was written for them.
Hold hands and stick together.
Hold hands if something shatters.
Hold hands. We’re not alone now.
Hold hands, our hearts matter.
I bring this same song now to many situations.
Stuart: How can we prepare children to move safely through the world? This next song takes place within the context of kids talking about what safety is. My friend Peg Flandreau West was a social worker, and she developed a system thirty-some years ago called Protective Behaviors. There was a terrible incident that happened to a child here in Madison, and so she began listening to children about safety, trying to understand more about what safety meant to them. And out of that, she developed a system with four parts.
The first is recognizing that you have the right to feel safe, which is, if you think deeply about it, a little bit revolutionary in itself.
The second is that whether you are safe or not is something connected to your body. And she called it the early warning signs. What’s your early warning sign?
Third thing was identifying people you know who you feel you can talk to. So, I wrote this song to reinforce these messages:
I got the right to feel safe, anytime, anyplace, anywhere, any day.
I got the right to feel safe. I got the right to feel safe.
In the pit of my stomach, right inside my heart.
A feeling gives me a warning when something scary starts.
I’m learning to pay attention when that’s going on.
Well, it might mean I’m a little bit scared
or that something’s really wrong. . . .
If something scary is happening and I don’t like at all,
there are people that I trust who I can give a call.
I’ll just keep on telling all of my trusted friends,
and I won’t stop my telling till I feel safe again.
Cause I got the right to feel safe, anytime, anyplace, anywhere, any day.
I got the right to feel safe. I got the right to feel safe.
Ruth: During one residency, I just about got laughed and shamed out of the room. I was with tenth graders, and I wasn’t used to working with tenth graders who are opinionated and growing adults.
I started singing some of these songs and they said to me, “How do you sing those songs? The world is not anything like you think it is.” And I was in that school because they had an assignment where they were looking at the causes of ethnic violence in the world—how to understand that, how to relate to it, and what to do about it. Well, they had no interest whatsoever in writing those songs. And unfortunately, I thought at that time, I cannot believe I have to go back—two more sessions, and there were four classes of tenth graders! I went home and I was really done in. I thought, How do I deal with this?
Well, I went back the next day. And I said to them, “You can tell from my songs that I really believe in people’s goodness. Do you know what it’s like to live believing in people’s goodness and to see what it’s like in the world? Do you know how depressed I can get? Do you know how upset I get?” They had already written off the world and there was nothing to do about it. And I said to them, “The conclusions you’ve come up with—is that what you want your younger sisters and brothers to also grow up thinking?”
And they looked at me like, “What, are you nuts?” No, is what they answered.
I said, “Well, what do you want them to know? How about instead of writing these other songs, we write songs about what you would want your younger sisters and brothers to think about?” My gosh. It changed everything. So, we wrote these songs. And they were so into it. I acknowledged their reality, and my point is that sometimes we have to have a hard shield around us. Stay with the conflict. Stay with it. Think out of the box.
Sarah: Thank you, Ruth and thank you, Stuart. Now comes the time in the workshop where we want to give space to hear from some people who’ve been listening.
Nancy Schimmel: I want to talk about your song, Ruth—“What Do I Do?” I was in a classroom the day after 9-11. And that was obviously the song to sing. And I did, and I sang a few verses. Then I asked the children to put in people for another verse, and one kid said, teacher. So, we sang, “What do I do when my teacher is crying?” And your song seemed to sum up everything that we felt.
Nancy Hershatter: Stuart, I really like using your song “Darkest Days.” It is one of the songs I think belongs in this list.
Even deep in winter, the sun will rise,
The sun will rise. The sun will rise.
Even deep in winter the sun will rise.
Even on the darkest days.
And then it’s a zipper: Your love will grow. Birds will sing. World will turn, people will cook. So simple and so beautiful. It doesn’t have to be winter. I mean, it’s the winter of one’s soul right now with what’s going on in the world. And the song is reassuring and warm and loving.
Sarah: Pam, you’re part of this team. What would you like to add?
Pam Felber: One of the songs that I think works really well is a song by Emma’s Revolution called “Peace Salaam Shalom.” Little, little children love to sing that song, and they’ll sing it over and over and over again. It’s very calming to them. And the other thing that I do is give time for gratitude at the end of every class. I call it opening up our flowers, and we name things we are thankful for. We say thank you for singing with me. Thank you for sharing the music. So, thank you three for sharing your music.
Stuart: There’s so much value in the act of singing together. The experience of singing together is kind of revolutionary in our culture in which people are so isolated and rarely get to experience the power of singing. The choice of songs matters, but, you know, the very experience also matters tremendously.