Kidisks, 1956

-c--c--c-"Records! Records!" yells the six-year-old with a gleeful face, dragging his mother toward the rack of colored "envelopes in the supermarket. Mother escapes to the grocery department, leaving her son to make his choice. She is barely out of sight when the tot spots a picture of a locomotive on one of the jackets and shrieks. "Ma! Ma! I'm ready!" She returns and exasperatedly says: "You've already got a choo-choo record." Then she scans the rack, and a nostalgic smile crosses her face as she picks up Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The child sees his chance for a choo-choo record going glimmering, starts up a siren wail. For a minute, it looks like a stalemate. But the conclusion was never in real doubt. "All right, so we'll get both of them," sighs mother, and plunks down 50-c- for the pair.

This is what the trade calls "impulse buying," and it accounts for most of today's estimated $15 million children's record business. The impulse is felt by all ages. Nobody among the junior low-fi set knows exactly what he will hear when he takes the disks home (buying has actually been cut down by a phonograph playing samples in the store) but the riotously colorful jackets are enough to make sales soar. Packaging and merchandising are fancy and getting fancier--Cellophane windows, stereoscopic pictures with viewer, picture books with sound cues on accompanying records for turning pages. But the tunes that go into the grooves have shown no basic development since Polly Put the Kettle On.

Adulterated Scores. Most important label in the mass market (25-c- to 49-c-) is Golden Records, a profitable subsidiary of giant book-publisher Simon & Schuster, which claims about half of the entire field.

Other leaders: ABC-Paramount, Cricket. Peter Pan. The basic types of children's records--called "kidisks" by Billboard: P: Stories with music, usually a familiar fairy tale with its teeth pulled: e.g., the wolf doesn't eat Little Red Riding Hood; Snow White's stepmother sends her to the woods, but not to be executed. P: Pop songs with a "kiddie beat." i.e., reduced intensity, such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, or Sixteen Tons, its lyrics altered to explain that coal is mined so that houses can be heated. P: Educational or uplift records such as The Alphabet Song, Counting Song (Cricket), good-neighbor songs, meet-the-orches-tra productions, and stories accompanied by adulterated symphonic scores, e.g., Ludwig Bemelmans' Madeline (RCA Victor). P: Special songs, which too often turn out to be inoffensive words set to poverty-stricken pop rhythms, or sugar-coated with a moral, as in Apple on a Stick (moral: share the goodies).

P: Folk or folk-type songs such as the delightful Songs to Grow On (Folkways LP), written and sung by Folk Singer Woody Guthrie. or the appealing Songs from "Music for Living" (Columbia). P: Educational records such as Soundbooks' Pueblo Indians or Songbirds of America.

A special category belongs to Walt Disney, whose film cartoons are the source of record material for almost every company in the field. In addition, there are a few classics that turn up repeatedly, e.g., Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and George Kleinsinger's Tubby the Tuba.

Mamma All the Time. Almost all children's music on records is subjected to a thoughtless attempt at simplification. Result: it is peeled down to musical "essentials," for example, simple chords that were commonplace in Mozart's day and obsolescent half a century ago. For youngsters, if not for today's grownups, a Bartok tune is as easy as the A-B-C Song, and chords, strangely enough, are confusing. It is quite possible that a decade of simple-minded children's records has conditioned today's teen-agers to their infatuation with equally simple-minded rock 'n' roll.

The men who produce children's records are hardly bothered by such considerations, frankly take their cues from a sense of "commercial value.'' Some principles of commercial value: i) select highly rhythmic songs and avoid featuring stringed instruments, particularly for younger children; 2) use a man's voice--kids hear mamma all the time.

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