See you then!

http://www.arrorrolullabies.com.ar/blog/

I sat down with Golder at El Hipopotamo in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires to learn more about what has been discovered in the 200 videos that have already been recorded, and how the project will evolve over the next two months leading up to its simultaneous live exhibition in Buenos Aires and Linz. Our conversation was in Spanish, but I have added English sub-titles to the video:

Just like with recipes, folk stories, and fashion, it is fascinating to observe how the verses and melodies of lullabies adapt as they travel across cultures and what those adaptations reveal about each culture. As Golder mentions in the video, when she asked a Korean shop owner here in Buenos Aires what lullabies she sang to her children, the shopkeeper’s simple response was, “I don’t.” Indeed, a cursory search on Google doesn’t elicit much other than a shaky cell phone video of a sweet grandfather humming a Korean folk lullaby to his newborn grandson and, via Wikipedia, a piano version of Ja Jang Ga. Digging a little deeper, however, I discovered that the Japanese lullaby Itsuki No Komoriuta (sung here by Shirley Yamaguchi) was allegedly first brought to Japan by Korean potters after the Japanese invasions of Korea from 1592 - 1598.

Lullabies - some of the first words we hear repeated as we enter this strange journey called life - have been traveling around the world for centuries, if not millennia. While we have many interactive atlases of human migration over the past 200,000 years, there are few atlases that illustrate the migration of culture.

Golder also notes the difference in themes that tend to appear in lullabies from particular regions. For example, she points to Duerme Negrito as typical of Latin American lullabies which frequently depict, in the words of blogger Romina Oliverio, “a peasant woman, working tirelessly in the fields to feed her little one. No pay; laboring while sick; day in and day out.”

Duerme Negrito also points to the darker sides of lullabies that can be difficult to digest in our era of globalized progressive liberalism. As discussed in the comment thread on Romina’s blog, one line of the lullaby translates literally to “if the black person doesn’t sleep, the white devil will come eat his little foot.” Similarly, I discovered via Solana Larsen, my Danish-Puerto Rican-American colleague at Global Voices, that the lyrics of Elefantens Vuggevise (Elephants Lullaby) were changed in the 1990’s to make the song more politically correct. The word, negerdukkedreng (negro boy doll) was changed to kokosnød (coconut).

I was so captivated by Golder’s description of her project that I decided to participate myself. I thought back on my own childhood and remembered three lullabies that my mother would sing to put me to sleep: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, 500 miles, and Day-O. All three songs became popular anthems of the 1960’s Folk Revival, which must be how my mom became familiar with their lyrics, but their origins are incredibly diverse. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was composed by Wallis Willis, a Choctaw freedman in the old Indian Territory, sometime before 1862. Day-O is a traditional Jamaican folk song, thought to be sung by Jamaican dock workers working the night shift loading bananas onto ships. It was first recorded in 1952 by Trinidadian singer Edric Connor, and then popularized in the United States by Harry Belafonte in 1956. 500 Miles was likely authored by Hedy West, the daughter of an Appalachian coal miner and labor activist, who moved to New York City at 21-years-old, and, according to Wikipedia, “was embraced by the Greenwich Village folk scene, and invited by Pete Seeger to sing alongside him at a Carnegie Hall concert.”

In the spirit of Arrorró, here I am singing a couple verses from Swing Low, Sweet Chariot:

My hope is that others will also upload videos of themselves singing the lullabies that were sung to them as children. I have already enlisted my friend and colleague from Trinidad and Tobago, Georgia:

There really isn’t much out there in terms of a collection of lullabies from around the world. Wikipedia has a skeleton of a post that is in desperate need of cleaning up and fleshing out. European lullabies are far better documented thanks to “Lullabies from the Cradle“, a project funded by the European Union to document the region’s lullabies in seven different languages. Arrorró has the potential to help fill in the gaps, to provide us with information, songs, and stories from regions and cultures that have, so far, tended to slip through the gaps of the digital divide.

Arrorró is a project about cultural diversity that attempts to create a technological bridge between different realities. Two cities will be connected in real time to share cradle songs, lullabies, and even songs to sleep and wake up to. It contains rhythms and sounds that can be understood across languages, barriers, and distances. The goal is for hundreds of people to share dreams, traditions, and languages through lullabies. Arrorró aims to couple emotion with technology, thereby creating a natural space to represent diversity.

Get involved in the project. Turn on your webcam and sing the lullabies you’ve heard as a child. Record your lullaby here.