How You’ve Grown - 10,000 Maniacs. A bit melancholy, but pretty and wistful.
Sugar Mountain by Neil Young
“Child’s Song” by Tom Rush
“Hailie’s Song” by Eminem
If you can find “A Long Time Ago” by Golden Smog (written and sung by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco) it might fit the bill. It’s a love letter from an older brother to a sister. Here’s a snip of the lyrics:
*I remember when mom and dad named you Claire
Before you were born, before you had hair
You don’t remember but I was there
I remember when you broke your arm
I know how you tell it
You get it all wrong
I loved you then and from now on
That was a long time ago
That was a long time ago*
also “I Knew This Place” by David Mallett
Ah, yes, that might have helped.:smack: Allow me to repost the relevant bit with link:
“…song from this Whoopi Goldbert/Carol Burnett sketch would work.”
“A Boy Named Sue” by Shel Silverstein/Johnny Cash. Kind of a sentimental coming of age story. (“My name is Sue! How do you do! Now you gonna die!”)
Weird. All parent/child songs I know are are sad, maudlin creations.
I can’t think of any cheerful “I love you kid/parent” songs at all!
It’s not quite about kids growing up, but Daddy’s Little Girl is a parent/child song.
Well, as my mother used to say (especially when trying to make me feel guilty for her loneliness), “The mother and child bond is at once the strongest on Earth and yet it’s the only one whose entire goal is separation. It’s engineered by the creator to be painful.”
When used as a recitative reading, incidentally, the response to this is “I’ll move some things around and come home this weekend.”
Here’s an oddball choice: Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen. Less of a song than advice set to music.
Damned good advice! And get off my lawn!
Hoodoo Voodoo? Words by Woody Guthrie, music written and performed by Billy Bragg and Wilco. Lyrics here. It’s essentially a song that Guthrie wrote for his kids, using some nonsense words, and just they way that they all interacted with each other. It’s actually a very good song.
Makes perfect sense to me. Jewish and Catholic mothers get more credit for it, but Southern mamas are pretty damned adept at guilt. (Says the child who grew up hearing “I’m sure your father would have handled this better…” during everything from first crush crises to menarche. And my mom wasn’t even all that crazy.)