Late folk legend Dave Van Ronk recorded a version of "Peter and the Wolf" that we've been digging on lately. Z is intimately familiar with both the story and the music of Peter and the Wolf - a favorite game of ours around the house is to quiz each other: "Which sound does the wolf make Z?" "Buuuuuh dah dah dah dah dah dah da da da da daaaaaa" (Yeah, it's hard to type - you can find a clip of each character's theme here.) Van Ronk put his on twist on the story by recording Peter and the Wolf using jug band instruments, and it's so much fun. Seriously, could there possibly be anything cooler?

Peter is the fiddle, the bird a penny whistle, the duck a kuzoo, grandpa is a mandolin, cat is a clarinet, hunters are a "snappy guitar," the wolf is "three deep voices" humming the wolf theme. Also included are a guitar, banjo, a jug and more instruments! Really, you've got to hear it to appreciate it!

The CD also includes six other songs, including one which Van Ronk describes as his "theme song," "Green, Green Rocky Road." It's a bit mellower than the "Peter and the Wolf" but you can get a taste of Van Ronk's talent and style in the video below.



This fun album is an easy ZRecs Top Pick. Its fusion of the jug band style and instrumentation with the classic story and music of "Peter and the Wolf" is a treat for any family. - Jennifer

AudibleKids is giving away three audio books to celebrate Roscoe Orman (Gordon on Sesame Street) joining their voice talent supergroup. Orman narrates Sarah Pennypacker's Clementine, and one of the three, Ricky & Mobo, was even written by Roscoe Orman (he narrates it too). The third, the Barack Obama biography for kids, Yes We Can, is nearly four hours long and targeted for kids ages 13 and up (a little younger for a listening audience). I'm downloading all three, the first two for Z's aural snacking now - audio books have been a big hit with her since we started producing our own kids' audiobooks - and I'll pick up the Obama bio to stash away for a few years. You can get all three free kids' audiobooks here.

[Via Baby Cheapskate] - Jennifer

Robbert Bobbert is the alter ego of Robert Schneider, frontman of the Beatles-meets-Beach-Boys-meets-indie pop band The Apples In Stereo. His debut album, Robbert Bobbert and the Bubble Machine (Little Monster Records), is a supersaturated blend of jangly guitars and singsong lyrics peppered with eclectic, mad-scientist percussive tracks and loops and recorded using the Wall of Sound production style developed by Phil Spectre and brought to indie rock by Schneider via the Elephant Six recording label. (Favorite Elephant Six album (mine): Neutral Milk Hotel's In An Aeroplane Over the Sea, which Schneider produced.)

Our favorite tracks from this album (the whole family) include "The Mighty Mighty Elephant," "Gravity," and "Fee Fi Fo Fum," the last of which deserves special props for using the old "raised pitch rapper" recording technique (think Sir Mix-a-Lot) to present, for the giddy enjoyment of any four-year-olds in the room, a rapping mouse describing his encounters with a "giant" (human) who catches him in the kitchen. You can listen to samples of all of these on Amazon and see what Robbert Bobbert is up to. Rumor has it he's working on a kids' show to spin off of this project, which makes a lot of sense... "We R Superheroes" actually sounds like a TV tryout, in both a good and bad way, like just enough or maybe a bit too much cotton candy on a hot day.

Win a Robbert Bobbert Bubble Party!

We have the fixins for a Robbert Bobbert and the Bubble Machine party to give away - a CD, ten Robbert Bobbert coloring pages, and a Gazillion Bubbles bubble machine from Funrise ($15ish on Amazon.com). To enter to win, check out the CD's sample playlist on Amazon and tell us which of the CD's songs you'd most like to see anchoring a new kids' show, and why! The most interesting and/or amusing entry gets the CD party, and we'll give the Robert Bobbert CD to two runners-up, too!

Official Rules: One entry per person. We'll accept entries between 10:00 p.m. CT March 4 and 10:00 a.m. CT March 7, 2009, although our server gets a little confused about the whole time zone thing, so it may end an hour earlier or later. No purchase necessary to enter or win. Approximate Retail Value of all prize packages: $30/$15/$15. Entrants must be 18 or older as of March 4, 2009. - Jeremiah

We have at least two more original audio stories up our sleeves, but this month have something to share that we're just as proud of: A reading of "The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck," one of my favorite children's stories by a masterful children's author, Beatrix Potter. Jemima, a naive duck so thoroughly snowed by a wily fox that she unwittingly gathers the ingredients to roast her with, is a simple and kind soul who is saved only through an encounter with a farm dog whose job is to keep such things from happening. Our version has an original banjo score by my father, Ken McNichols, with recording by Joshua McNichols and narration by me.

Beatrix Potter had a gift for imbuing her animal characters with anthropomophic personalities that are based on an inspired understanding of the species to which they belong, and "Jemima" is no exception. Foxes in children's books are always wily, but it takes a Beatrix Potter to also make one into a patchy aristocrat with the patience of a cold-blooded killer; character sketches are often fleshed out in a single, perfect phrase for even the most minor characters. Add to that the sense of foreboding that builds as the story progresses, and an ending that ties right back into its opener, and you have a short bit of great world literature.

Play story

You can listen to the story using the little "play" button above, or right-click on the story title to "Save As" and download the mp3 file. You can also access this story, as well as the two we published already and the two or more to follow, on Punnybop's Audio Archive page.

You can buy "Jemima Puddle-Duck" in the great Beatrix Potter: The Complete Tales, a $40 hardcover currently on sale on Amazon.com for about $25, or read the story online for free (with Potter's original illustrations) at Project Gutenberg.

This file is hereby released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. You are welcome to download, share, and remix it as you like, provided you credit this original work, cite ZRecs.com as its creator, do not distribute it or derivative works for profit, and link to it so others can find it at the source.

Photo by tifotter, shared via Flickr. - Jeremiah

Once upon a time, some water in the ocean was warmed by the sun and floated up into the sky in little bits so small no one could see them. When the water got up high enough, the little bits started to stick together, and they made some little clouds. And one of the little clouds was named Gerald.

Gerald the Cloud

A brief discussion of clouds and could types with Z during a long car ride got me thinking that an interesting story could be made of characters who were different cloud types, and I liked the idea of a character who formed at the beginning of a story and dissipated at the end, as a part of the water cycle. I bounced some ideas off Jenni and then wrote and edited and wrote some more until I came up with something to present to my daughter. Having already heard a rough cut of "The Two Bears and the Carousel," our first audio story release, I found it easier to think of the story in terms of its sounds; theatre actor and director Josiah Wallace made great use of the opportunities for sound effects. As with our previous release, Ken McNichols composed and performed music, and Joshua McNichols, a reporter at Seattle public radio station KUOW, recorded, collected sound effects, and mixed the audio. Some stereo effects are lost in mono listening (the mountain goat's heartbeat, for example) but the story should work on any device.

You can listen to the file by clicking on the story title above, or right-click on it to "Save As" and download the mp3 file. We're also now hosting these stories on an "Audio Archive" page on Punnybop, where we'll organize all future hosted and original entertainment content. (Yep, we have plans.)

This file is hereby released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. You are welcome to download, share, and remix it as you like, provided you credit this original work, cite ZRecs.com as its creator, do not distribute it or derivative works for profit, and link to it so others can find it at the source.

Photo by KmountMan, shared via Flickr. - Jeremiah

Pierre Kartner, or "Vader Abraham" as he was known throughout much of the world in the 1970s and '80s, was a popular 1960s Europop musician who found a second, and much longer-lasting career as a fake Hasidic Jew who sang songs about the Smurfs. Yes, you heard me right. It all came together fairly suddenly in 1977, but Kartner knew enough not to stop a train. Here he is at the peak of his powers.


Vader Abraham began his post-pop career in the early 1970s writing alternately misty-eyed and goofy cafe songs that were popular with a Dutch mainstream culture looking for a way out of both 1960s radicalism and American-oriented rock. The name of his character was tied to his first single, a version of the traditional song "Father Abraham Had Seven Sons." Things went reasonably well for him for several years, but in 1977 he was asked to write a song for an animated move then in development called The Smurfs. After the single's first pressing of 1,000 copies sold out in a day, 900,000 more flew off the shelves, and the hit was rerecorded in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Japanese, with Kartner himself singing every version.

Vader Abraham became an international sensation, and released much of his music in English. He started his act with a fake beard, but then grew a real one, and has sported it ever since, and wholeheartedly and permanently adopted his role with a level of commitment and comfort Paul Reubens or other children's entertainers could never muster long-term.



Later decades saw surreal celebrations of his music, riding the wave of his immense popularity in the 1970s and the impact his music had on two generations of the Dutch: The middle-aged cafe-goers of the 1970s and the children they raised on his Smurfenland songs. Small countries that only occasionally export their pop culture to wild acclaim generally remain fond of them long after their time has passed, and it didn't hurt that there is something inescapably avuncular and familiar about a man who sings songs which often feature "la" as the most frequently used word.


Vader Abraham's connection with the Smurfs came to an end in the 1990s when he was left out of the revamped television series. He was, however, tapped to write the opening theme for another truly international cartoon, The Moomin, in one of its main animated incarnations. (I wrote recently about the Moomin in another Punnybop post.) If you doubted that Abraham's singsong was a signature style, listen to this and you'll realize you've just become an expert on the musical stylings of Pierre Kartner's second career.

- Jeremiah