Where I'm from in the U.S., (well, all over, but more concentratedly so in my region), there's a

ton
mess
veritable traffic-jam
glut
overabundance
unnecessary plethora

of people styling themselves as kids' entertainers, children's-music performers and other similar appellations.

I've noticed something as I've recently been revisiting the life and works of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, decidedly decedent.

An awful lot (and they are, by and large, an awful lot) of these folks have done one of two things in an effort to present themselves as professional/legitimate/hire-worthy:

1) They've glommed on to 20-plus-year-old elementary-education research that showed that multi-sensory interaction with little kids is developmentally important.

Now, while that's good, what happened as a result of these performers being exposed to that research

(there used to be seminars on the stuff that were open to non-education-licensed layfolk)

is that a whole wave of performers put together almost-identical programs of insipid songs and basic activities like giving each child a shaker/maraca/tambourine to flail along with.

Seriously, I thought I needed experience with that sort of program years ago, and I went to work for a person who had paid for the Deluxe Certificate Package from this or that seminar.

It didn't last long, but when someone pointed me to a daycare center that wanted a substitute singer/musician, I went for an interview and met a man who had never heard of my former employer nor their Deluxe Certificate, but, lo and behold, had his own nearly-identical program, gleaned from his investment in a seminar, the result of which was his own framed Deluxe Certificate.

You can imagine my frustration when I attempted to find out whether anyone was doing things differently. Alas, it was website after free-hosted-website of the same thing.

Or,

2) they've decided that playing classic-rock songs and/or trying to instruct children in performing said odious noise is a good way to teach them music and to make it seem educational and developmentally beneficial.

Whereas there was a preponderance of amateurish guitar-chorders handing out rattles and blowing soap bubbles, next there were "School Of Rock" clones everywhere.

I'm not intending to be entirely dismissive of either approach as a whole. There certainly can be some benefits to social interactions around music with one's peers at young ages, I grant.

What intrigues me is how markedly different these approaches were/are from the efforts of people like Guthrie. No, not a simple man to admire - he was difficult to know or to gauge from day to day, his friends and biographers have said.

Not a massive talent as a vocalist or instrumentalist, and certainly possessed of more than a little self-conscious positioning/presenting of himself as a man of the people (not inauthentic, just careful).

His ability to just encapsulate the playfulness and absurdist fun of childlike language, though!

I'd put "Riding In My Car" and "Howdido" and more of Woody's songs, even "grown up" songs, a shelf above most of the material foisted upon unsuspecting parental patrons by the Deluxe Certificate crowd any day.

Your thoughts?