Down By The Bay

This popular old tune has been adapted many times over the years. For our setting, we have dreamed up a whole new series of rhymes... and we encourage you and your students to do the same.

There are several things that make this tune fun to sing. For one thing, it is a question and answer song. Through the first part of the song, each phrase is answered by an identical one. In our recording, we divided our group into two parts with one answering the other. You may wish to have the "question" part of each phrase sung by a soloist - it works great that way. Each verse finishes with a different silly rhyme involving an animal doing something improbable. For our version we concocted these:

...newt tooting on a flute

...ferret munching on a carrot

...fox wearing purple socks

...spider drinking apple cider

...gnu playing a kazoo

...goat drink a root beer float

...trout eating sauerkraut

...bunny spending funny money

...moose climbing up a spruce

As we mentioned earlier, this is an ideal way to encourage creativity in your students by letting them dream up their own verses. To do so, be sure that your rhythms fit the formula of the song. For instance, the name of the animal and the ending word of the action need to match, or at least you need to use the right number of syllables to make it match. For our version, we stuck to one and two syllables for simplicity's sake. But if you have adventurous students, let them try longer animal names. ("Did you ever see a grizzly bear combing out his frizzy hair?") Half of the fun is dreaming them up.

Our recording is folk style, featuring guitar, banjo, dobro, bass, and drums along with a fiddle duet doubling the melody. We have recorded two different versions of the tune, one with five verses (tracks 6 and 22) and a shorter one with just three verses (tracks 16 and 31).

In addition to the creativity available for new lyrics, this tune also provides you a good chance to use classroom and other simple percussion instruments. Setting up basic swing rhythms for sand blocks or washboard should be easy, and doing off beats with rhythm sticks or woodblocks would be fun. Lastly, pick a "solo instrument" such as cowbell, slide whistle, or any silly short sound and drop it into the one beat rest created in bars 17, 18, and similar bars at the end.

Perform it with exuberance and have fun with it.