The Politics of Low and High Culture: Representations of Music in Some Recent Children's Picture Books

Music has been prominently represented in children's literature since long before the first child read "Sing a Song of Sixpence" in Mother Goose. Whereas older expressions of music appear mostly in the sing-song rhythm of the language accompanying the pictures rather than in the pictures and stories themselves, recently children's picture books designed for readers from four to eight years old have begun to treat music as a specific theme or narrative element. What I find particularly interesting is that in children's picture books, music is, more often than not, represented fairly specifically as an artifact of either high or low culture. But whether the music appears as a feature of the culture of the wealthy or the lower classes, its representation always reinscribes itself as a feature of commodity culture. Some texts try to engage in passing, by pretending to offer low-culture products, while they are really reinforcing bourgeois values. Others are clearly artifacts of either low or high culture, reinforcing specific class-determined values. Still others pretend to eliminate the division between the classes and between low and high culture.

For example, Thatcher Hurd's Mama Don't Allow presents a bayou world of muskrats and alligators, all of whom appreciate music, more specifically jazz, a style historically allied with the low culture of smoky bars and illiterate musicians. In this narrative, the Swamp Band secures a gig but ends up commodifying itself in a way the musicians have not anticipated. Miles, the saxophone-playing protagonist, and his musician buddies discover, after playing a rousing rendition of the ungrammatically titled song "Mama Don't Allow," that they are dinner for their cavorting employers, a bunch of zoot-suited alligators and their gaudily dressed mates, all of whom are clearly out for a good time. The band members convince the carnivores to allow them to play one more song before they are thrown into the stew. Miles and his crafty bunch put the alligators to sleep with a verse whose first line presents a rising moon and invokes a natural setting common to songs from lullabies to lieder, yet whose resolution is situated in a decidedly low cultural space, the swamp.^* The last line of the song, which ends on the words "gooey, damp mud," offers a surprising twist on the easy, rhyming rhythm of the preceding lines, disrupting the romantic representations of a conventional lullaby, albeit situated in the bayou, with a sensate evocation of realistic swamp life, a world where, once you're lulled to sleep, the unexpected, the dangerous, appears. In this lullaby whose closure verges on the post-modern, however, nothing frightening actually occurs, and Miles and the Swamp Band escape their fate as entree. Thus, the safety and security of the muskrat bourgeoisie as represented by the clichéd domesticity of Miles's home, where the nice, nuclear mom and dad beg their young son to take his music outside, is maintained even in the face of a challenge by the lower-class alligators in their tasteless costumes.

Hurd's book's incorporation of low-culture subject matter only serves to insist on its position as a product of high culture. For while it is true that Cajun life (and some jazz) has within the past fifteen years or so become a folklife fad, it has ascended to that position only, I would wager to say, among those who can afford to appreciate the culture of Louisiana by following the exploits of Paul Prudhomme in various gourmet magazines, by purchasing seafood to create Cajun dishes, and by investing in new compact discs that remix old jazz greats. Cajun culture has been commodified and coopted by the bourgeoisie, with Zydeco bands appearing regularly on shows broadcast nationally on that most middle-class of media, National Public Radio.

Similarly, My Little Island by Frane Lessac, a brightly illustrated narrative of the author's adventures upon his return to the Caribbean island of his birth, proffers a representation of calypso and reggae music, referring to the steel drums...