Once kids get to age 4 or so, they are ready to move beyond familiar nursery songs (“Row Row Row Your Boat,” “Twinkle Twinkle”) to try to master songs with a little more complexity. Hence, the appeal of classic rhymes like “The House that Jack Built” and “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” and story songs like “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
As this literary blogger notes, these repetitive, cumulative rhyming songs provide lasting appeal. And in the grand folk tradition, these songs are often tinged with “a good sprinkling of underlying, shivery darkness.” Cumulative story-songs are part of an ancient, memory-enhancing oral tradition handed down through countless generations. Kids respond to these songs as if they come from deep within their genetic coding.
