Recalling the stories behind Kid Pan Alley songs
KPA ‘has changed my son’s life. He comes home singing every day’
Performing before an audience of about a dozen Rapp at Home members, Kid Pan Alley’s Paul Reisler and Cheryl Toth told the stories behind many of Paul’s songs. “Life is good because we are alive,” was a lyric written by a class of mostly autistic children. Kids in rural North Carolina, in a mostly white area, were interested in racism, and so they wrote “Skin” with the refrain, “Skin — it’s just the suit you’re in.” A class in Northwest D.C. wrote a song about what they would do if they’d forgotten to charge their phones. “I guess I’ll just go out and play,” it concluded. And several groups chose to write songs about “Best Friends.”
These co-written songs take shape in two onehour sessions. Paul and Cheryl and grammar schoolaged kids from all over the country work together to create the lyrics based on the children’s ideas. Paul and Cheryl teach the classes about pitch and rhythm. They talk about different styles of music, like blues, rock, and folk, and choose which style best suits the song’s theme.
These song-writing workshops can mean a lot to those attending. One mother took Paul aside and told him the session “has changed my son’s life. He comes home singing every day.” Paul said that songwriting is particularly valuable in schools where arts programs have never existed or been curtailed. Teachers often integrate the songs into the curriculum.
Paul founded Kid Pan Alley with his since deceased wife, Julie Portman, in 1999. It began with a three-week residency program in Rappahannock during which they co-wrote 60 songs with all 600 elementary school children. Since that start, more than 65,000 children have co-written over 2,700 songs.
Cheryl, who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music education, was the principal of an elementary school in Fairfax where Paul brought Kid Pan Alley. “Paul got called to the principal’s office,” she laughed, referring to the beginning of their personal and professional relationship. Cheryl joined Kid Pan Alley as Executive Director in 2014.
Paul has written about 3,500 songs and other music compositions — more than the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Stephen Foster combined. The Rapp at Home group was moved by the song “Forgiveness” that he wrote with three collaborators, all of whom had loved ones with mental illness. And they chuckled at the song “Forgetting” with the final line “I can’t remember what I forgot.”
Paul and Cheryl concluded their concert with an invitation to Rapp at Home folks to write their own song, with their help. Chairman of the Board, Joyce Wenger, sprang up to say, “We’d love to!”
Kid Pan Alley will have a residency at Wakefield Country Day School in Flint Hill the week of March 7–13. The concluding concert, which is open to the public, is Friday, March 13 at 3:00 p.m.