Father Goose Music Community Holiday Party
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.