MUSIC
From Dancehall Rapper to Nursery Rhymer
IF you’ve never heard of Father Goose, just ask a kid. As part of the eclectic family music ensemble Dan Zanes & Friends, Father Goose, a k a Wayne Rhoden, is the boisterous, big-bellied Jamaican guy who routinely steals the show with his gruff renditions of “Georgie Porgie” and the “Hokey Pokey.”
“When I say Father, you say Goose!” he commands, and hundreds of little voices obey.
Mr. Rhoden has appeared on all five of Mr. Zanes’s children’s CDs, including the 2006 release “Catch That Train!,” which won a Grammy Award for best musical album for children.
“I notice a lot of people say they’re doing kids music, and they try to water it down,” Mr. Rhoden said in an interview. “Just be yourself.” (He will perform with Mr. Zanes in two shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music next Sunday.)
But Mr. Rhoden’s act wasn’t always so kid-friendly. Just as Mr. Zanes was once the lead singer for a 1980s rock band called the Del Fuegos, Mr. Rhoden’ had a musical career with an even more unexpected first act. During the 1980s and ’90s Father Goose was known as Rankin Don, a hardcore dancehall rapper (or “D.J.” in reggae parlance) from Brooklyn. His best-known release was the 12-inch single “Baddest D.J.,” a brazen declaration of lyrical superiority punctuated with gun-slinging hyperbole: “The 16 ’pon me back, the Desert Eagle ’pon me hip.”
Small wonder then that some of his old friends gave him grief when they saw him goofing around with Mr. Zanes on the Disney Channel. “Oh gosh, I’m still hearing about that,” Mr. Rhoden said.
Still, he said, he has no regrets.
“The dancehall thing is more rough,” said Mr. Rhoden, who’s still following his boyhood passion for music at 41. “But 9 times out of 10 I’m not that rough. As Rankin Don, you have to be so hard or whatever. Now I can just lay back and be me.”
Since the debut of “Sesame Street” 40 years ago, grown-up musicians from Stevie Wonder to Tony Bennett have dabbled in music for children. The trend appears to have accelerated with Alicia Keys singing on a 2007 episode of “Backyardigans” and the old-school rapper Biz Markie supplying a Beat of the Day on the children’s show “Yo Gabba Gabba!”
The alternative rockers They Might Be Giants recently released their third record for children, “Here Come the 123s.” And on another new CD, “Baby Loves Hip Hop,” a posse of middle-aged rappers — including Prince Paul, De La Soul and Lady Bug Mecca of Digable Planets — join forces as the Dino 5. At this rate, it seems, purple dinosaurs and hand puppets could soon be driven out of work by aging pop stars.
But nobody has made the transition more successfully than Mr. Zanes, who long ago abandoned singing “songs about old girlfriends and drinking,” as he said in a recent interview, in favor of a loose, homespun sound he calls “all-ages music.”
Mr. Rhoden has come a long way since he was known as Rankin Don, but he hasn’t tried to play down his rough-and-tumble dancehall days. His recent children’s album, “It’s a Bam Bam Diddly!,” released late last year, is a return to his reggae roots. The disc offers infectiously fresh interpretations of traditional West Indian folk songs along with a few originals performed — in authentic patois and kreyol — by Father Goose and a galaxy of Caribbean stars who live in Brooklyn, including Sister Carol, Screechy Dan and Ansel Meditation of the harmony trio the Meditations. (Sheryl Crow and Mr. Zanes also contribute.) The album’s title track was the most-played song on XM Satellite Radio’s children’s program and has also cracked Billboard’s Reggae chart, an unprecedented feat for any dancehall artist.
“Father Goose is bringing back straight old-time Jamaican music,” said the Jamaican journalist and broadcaster Dermot Hussey, who is program director of a reggae program on XM Satellite Radio. “There’s nothing risqué in there, and no violent imagery whatsoever. It’s great, and I think it opens up another side of our culture for people. As we say, ‘the half that’s never been told.’ ”
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Mr. Rhoden’s album is the way it reconnects dancehall with its roots in songs like “Chi Chi Budoo” and “Long Time Gal,” which were first popularized by the folklorist and poet Louise Bennett, a Jamaican national hero better known as Miss Lou. Even as late as 1980 Jamaican dancehall pioneers Michigan & Smiley adapted one of their biggest hits, “Rub a Dub Style,” from the nursery rhyme “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.” Such innocent themes eventually fell out of favor in the dancehall, but as Mr. Rhoden said, “Sometimes you have to go back to go forward.”
Like many of his musical peers Mr. Rhoden, who was born in Jamaica in 1966 and moved to New York with his family in 1981, came of age during the city’s crack epidemic. He managed to stay out of trouble, even though gun-toting bad boys were very much a part of the dancehall milieu.
“Don wasn’t no gangster cat in the ’hood,” said his longtime friend Coolie Ranx, a musician and part-time real estate broker who sings on the album’s title track. “His claim to fame is more that people love this dude. He’s a funny guy, fun to be around, and a diehard music man.”
In 1984, while the Del Fuegos were being anointed the best new band by Rolling Stone magazine, Rankin Don was starting to make his name in the streets of the East Flatbush neighborhood known as the Nineties, building up a mobile sound system that he brought to local basement parties. While a student at Erasmus Hall high school Mr. Rhoden bluffed his way into his first big gig, at the Biltmore Ballroom, Brooklyn’s dancehall mecca.
The packed dance was advertised as Jamaica versus Guyana, with Rankin Don’s sound system, then known as Kill-a-Man-J.J., representing Jamaica. Mr. Rhoden emerged victorious after turning up his bass speakers so loud that some of the Biltmore’s ceiling tiles fell down.
The unlikely alliance between a rock musician from New Hampshire and a dancehall artist from Jamaica is the sort of cultural collision that could only have happened in Brooklyn. The year was 1999, and Mr. Zanes was telling Joyce Rhoden, a baby sitter and family friend, about his love for Jamaican music. “You’ve got to meet my son,” he remembers her saying. “I’m not sure what he does. He never invites me. It’s in the dance halls. And I don’t think I want to go anyway.”
Mr. Zanes said: “At the time all I cared about in life was Jamaican music.” He invited Mr. Rhoden to his apartment, where he recorded a spicy a capella introduction for use at Mr. Zanes’s live shows. The pair hit local reggae record shops together, and a friendship was born. Mr. Rhoden soon invited Mr. Zanes to appear in the humorous video for his self-produced single “Green Card,” which became a minor sensation with Brooklyn’s Caribbean population. As the only white person in the video, Mr. Zanes was cast as the immigration officer, chasing Rankin Don and his friends around Brooklyn.
Both men’s first children were born in 2000, prompting Mr. Zanes to make a cassette of family music as a gift to friends. He called on Mr. Rhoden to sing a few nursery rhymes. On the spur of the moment they came up with a skit about a Jamaican Mother Goose who sends her cake-loving husband to the studio as a last-minute replacement. They called the song “Father Goose,” and Rankin Don was soon reborn.
The cassette became so popular that they decided to re-record the songs on a CD. In 2000 it became the first Dan Zanes & Friends release, “Rocket Ship Beach,” and was a children’s hit, selling 44,000 copies. Over all, their five all-ages albums have sold about 350,000 copies. But bringing Father Goose to the stage was another sort of challenge.
“The very first time I remember performing with Dan it was scary to me,” said Mr. Rhoden, who said he thought, “What am I going to do in front of kids?” But he soon realized that the same call-and-response techniques he used with the dancehall crowd worked just as well with a much shorter audience.
Though the kids loved him immediately, the critics were not always kind to Father Goose. “Maybe some of Dan Zanes’s friends should have stayed out of the recording studio,” said a skeptical early review in Sing Out! magazine. “For example, Father Goose, who can’t sing in tune.”
But Father Goose has contributed much more to the Dan Zanes & Friends phenomenon than guest vocals. From the start he’s acted as a sort of cultural liaison. “I always wanted music that sounded like my neighborhood,” Mr. Zanes said, “and my neighborhood had a lot of West Indian people in it.” Many Dan Zanes releases feature Caribbean folk songs sung by the Sandy Girls, a quartet of baby sitters that sometimes included Joyce Rhoden.
For Mr. Rhoden, doing a solo album “was always in the back of my mind,” and Mr. Zanes suggested they work on it together. But a few of the guest artists were surprised to be invited.
“It took me into a different arena,” said Screechy Dan, a dancehall vocalist who appears on three tracks. But he said he was ready to take chances: “Music is music.”
Mr. Rhoden said of his second career: “To be honest, I didn’t expect any of this. Just to see so many people embracing it with so much love is unbelievable.” Now Father Goose has begun rehearsing his own reggae band and making plans for a tour. And as for his show with Dan Zanes & Friends at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, suffice it to say that Father Goose has invited a few friends. “It’s going be one big party,” he said. “Everybody knows I’m the one that normally get the party started. My party started in Jamaica, and everywhere I go there’s a party. And the party doesn’t stop.”
An article last Sunday about the musician Father Goose misstated the name of the Grammy Award-winning Dan Zanes and Friends album on which he appeared. It was “Catch That Train!” not “Stop That Train!”
