The Broadside Band – Old English Nursery Rhymes

Price: €17.00

Heather loves nursery rhymes, so we’ve listened to a lot of nursery rhyme CDs, and this is the best we’ve come across. It’s got pretty much every English rhyme – Baa Baa Black Sheep, Little Bo Peep, Jack and Jill, Three Blind Mice, Lavender’s Blue, Mary had a Little Lamb, Ring o’ rosies, etc, etc  – 52 tracks in all. The music is performed in an old English folk style, which sounds pretty much like you’d imagine it – picture a pub in merrie old England with long wooden tables serving tankards of ale and pigeon pie, or perhaps a scene from the court of Charles II complete with minstrels and jester, and this is the kind of soundtrack you might expect. Or I might expect, I’ve really no idea how closely my imagined Olde England corresponds to reality. Anyway, it’s a little bit like Irish traditional music, but more sedate and formal and somehow more medieval, played on fiddles, lutes and recorders and sung by two English-accented singers who sound faintly like Chumbawamba.

I’ve always had a soft spot for nursery rhymes myself, and have often plundered them in my own songwriting even before we had kids, but even I’d be unlikely to sit and listen to this all the way through for pure enjoyment. I would, however, happily listen to half an hour of it – it’s well arranged and well performed, and it’s head-and-shoulders above most of its competition, avoiding the usual irritating mannerisms you find on nursery rhyme collections. Plus, out of all the nursery rhyme CDs we have, this is the one Heather means when she points at the CD player and shouts “IMES! IMES!”.