Who We Are
	The Family Sing - Celebrating Charity Bailey

Last Saturday’s Family Sing had already begun when a buzz started making its way around the room. Soon people were peeking over their shoulders to catch a glimpse of the tall, thin man wearing a red wool cap who had quietly taken a seat in the back row of the auditorium. It was Pete Seeger, America’s most beloved folk singer, who had come down from the country with his wife, Toshi Seeger '36, to join in the celebration of Charity Bailey, the legendary LREI music teacher to whom this year’s Family Sing was dedicated.

It was just one memorable moment among many. The event, co-sponsored by the Children’s Music Network, started earlier in the morning with a talk by Nora Guthrie, LREI class of ’67, who spoke about her father Woodie’s life and work. Nora was spectacular - riveting, poignant, hilarious and profound. She clearly demonstrated Woodie Guthrie’s huge influence on American culture in the second half of the twentieth century. Lots of current LREI parents, alumni and former faculty were there to hear it, including Susan Glass, mother of Sam in Early K, and founding director of The Glass Managerie, one of the City’s leading choral groups, as well as long time LREI staff members Marie Weiss and Grace Cohen.

The Family Sing started at 1:00 PM and the room was bursting at the seams. It was a true community event, the third in a series that started in very different circumstances three years ago after the trauma of 9-11. Many alumni joined us this year, traveling to New York from far and near, to honor the extraordinary teacher who had such an impact on them in the very same room in which they now sat excitedly, together with current LREI families, singing Charity Bailey’s songs.

Charity, who taught at Little Red from 1943 to 1954, had a remarkable career – and lived an equally remarkable life: teacher, instrumentalist, folksinger, recording artist, composer, arranger, ethnomusicologist, pioneer of the early days of children’s television - Charity Bailey was all of these things and more. She was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1904. Her family was very active in the city’s African-American community. Her upbringing instilled in her a penchant for the arts, for education, for social uplift and active citizenship. In 1927 she received her degree in education from the Rhode Island School of Education. However, racial barriers excluded her from a teaching job in her hometown, so she traveled south to work at historically black institutions, including the Spelman College Laboratory School, in Atlanta. Later she returned north, to New York City, where she lived in Harlem and accepted a chance to direct at a Children’s Music Center downtown. She stayed in the neighborhood, later teaching at the Henry Street Settlement, while also continuing her education and launching her career as a performer and a recording artist.

She studied advanced piano at the Juilliard School and was the first African American graduate of the prestigious Dalcroze School of Music. She also became known for her work on the concert stage, both as a vocalist and instrumentalist, performing on guitar and piano every kind of music from classical to the emerging genre of folk. But folk music was the area in which she would go on to make her widely recognized contributions as an ethnomusicologist and teacher. Discovering, transcribing, arranging and teaching people’s music from every part of the world were her passions, which she brought to LREI when she joined the faculty in 1943. In 1950-51, the school gave her a sabbatical, which she used to live in Haiti to research, record and transcribe the songs and dances of the Haitian people. She became nationally known for her own arrangements of African, Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean folk songs and for adapting folk tales to music and incorporating them into her lesson plans.

Her recording career began in the early fifties while she was still at LREI. Ultimately she recorded over fourteen albums, her first on the Folkways label in 1951 along with Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly and many other famous names. This was during the early years of the new medium of television, and Bailey was a visionary who immediately sensed TV’s educational potential. She left Little Red in 1954 to host the New York area’s first racially integrated television program, “Sing A Song with Charity Bailey.” Students from LREI along with other Greenwich Village neighborhood kids appeared weekly on the programs, which were based on her classes at our school. A decade later there would be a second program called "Here’s Charity.” Both programs were widely praised by critics and viewers who saw her work as a respite from the “rantings and ravings,” as one letter to the New York Times put it, of such rivals for children’s loyalty as “The Howdy Doody Show”!

Charity was remembered on Saturday as a gifted and charismatic teacher of young children and as the composer and arranger of folk songs and ballads from around the country and the world, which she taught to a generation of Little Red students. LREI was the perfect match for Charity Bailey. “Still listening,” she wrote, “was the ultimate goal of the concert hall – but not of the classroom.” Creative dance and movement were the keys to developing and understanding musical patterns and form, tempo and dynamics, melody and harmony. These thoughts were certainly in line with the ideas of Elisabeth Irwin, who regarded music and movement as the basic media not only of self-expression, but also of communication, creating a firm foundation for cognitive, logical and linguistic development. Charity wrote “that a child’s body is his first instrument.” Elisabeth Irwin certainly would have agreed. In Charity Bailey’s classroom, children were constantly doing, not sitting still and listening, expressing themselves through dance and movement, playing indigenous instruments from around the world that Charity brought into the class - tambourines, drums, bells, Chinese temple blocks, rhythm sticks, gongs, coconut cymbals, maracas and rattles made from gourds.

Folk music was the perfect core curriculum of such a musical education. It represented, “the spontaneous reaction of human beings to their environment, an honest reaction of people to their cultures and their eras, true documents in song.” Little Red students sang sea chanteys and work songs and ballads describing the lives of sailors, prisoners, minstrels, miners and cowboys. There was music from around the world, Irish ballads, Welsh lullabies, Negro spirituals and Japanese miners, songs from the Caribbean and China, Italy, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Alumni remember singing such lyrics as “Drill Ye Tarriers Drill,” “Paddy Workin’ on the Railway,” “The Erie Canal,” “What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor” and “Down in the Valley.”

Some of this timeless music rang through the halls of LREI again on Saturday. Led by Sue Ribaudo, LREI’s Lower School Music Specialist, along with guest song leaders including current and former teachers, and parent musicians, we sang the songs that have become unforgettable memories of childhood for generations of Little Red students. The children sat together on a carpet in the middle of the room, surrounded by parents, alumni and friends of our school. It was an amazing afternoon. But perhaps most amazing of all, at least to some of the adults in the room, was when the tall man in the red cap slowly ambled up to the front of the room and started playing along on his famous banjo, really getting into it, leading the entire room in a stirring rendition of “Down by the Riverside,” to the absolute delight of the mesmerized boys and girls sitting at his feet! Someday their parents will explain to them who that man was!

Nicholas O’Han
School Historian
April 14, 2005