When generations in the future look back on the 21st century and earlier, there will likely be several things to cause heads to shake. One of those that will assuredly make some cringe will be the general treatment of children during early development. For many years, the prevailing thought was that children will get over whatever affects them or ails them in their primary years. Adulthood, the thought is, will rectify those wounds. But that’s not actually the case. The reality is that our earliest experiences set the trajectory for our lives in adulthood. And acclaimed songwriter and performer Raffi Cavoukian knows this perhaps better than any other artist.
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Raffi has made a career writing music that both entertains and elucidates the notion that when we are about five or six years old, our understanding of what it means to be human is shaped forever, for better or worse. Today, Raffi continues to highlight this idea, through his many works, including his recent collaboration with fellow children’s songwriter Lindsay Munroe.
“I marvel at the human beings kids are,” Raffi tells American Songwriter. “They’re so spontaneous and creative and playful. It’s important to highlight ‘playful.’ Play is an intelligence that all kids possess. It’s the way they learn. They try on the world for size through play, through imaginative play freely directed by themselves. Free play.”
Our earliest formative years, from 0-5, Raffi says, are fundamental. In those years we learn “nothing less than how it feels to be human.” Raffi poses the simple question: do those first years instill a sense of challenges and constraints on what it is to feel human, do they make the child anxious and fearful or do they offer feelings of possibility and encouragement? If it’s the latter, that is what’s most likely to produce the “resourceful, productive citizen you want walking down the street of your community,” Raffi says. If it’s the former, then the community may not be as lucky.
“Imagine then,” he says, “the importance of working with children to instill positive life-affirming first experiences of life. That’s what we all deserve. That’s what we should work to make possible for every child in our community. Maybe instead of 2,000 years [in the future], we can understand it in the next 20 years.”
The 73-year-old Raffi grew up in an Armenian family. He was born in Cairo, Egypt. His father was a musician who also sang in church choirs. He would perform at family parties and play music on the “high-fidelity” stereo, as it was known by the unit then. Raffi grew up listening to music from the ‘50s. It was a multi-cultural tapestry of songs from Europe, America, and elsewhere abroad. Later, his family moved to Toronto, Ontario when Raffi was 10 years old. But his life’s path began to take shape when he got his first guitar at 16 years old. He listened to and played along with the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Motown, and Pete Seger. At first, the guitar seemed impossible but as he practiced he got it. Then he learned to sing and play at the same time.
“I was delighted to find out,” Raffi says, “that in fact the impossible was actually possible.”
He began playing in the Toronto coffee house scene, which was big at the time. He also participated in a program in the area that brought music to children, the same program that children’s entertainers Sharon, Lois & Bram came up in. Raffi put out his first album in 1975 and followed that with three more in two years. His parents had moved the family from Cairo to Toronto to give their children a chance at a better life in a free country and their decision had paid off. Raffi feels a strong sense of gratitude for landing in Canada, for the country opening its borders and allowing his family in. In so doing, he was exposed to new North American cultures, including nursery rhymes and songs for kids (and lots of hockey games).
“I think it’s interesting that the songs I was singing for children,” Raffi says. “They weren’t part of my childhood. I had to learn them word-for-word. There was a freshness to it all.”
A career is often sparked by a single bit of inspiration. For Raffi, his entry to children’s music began with his wife, a kindergarten teacher, taught him about the value of music in a young child’s life. Especially music that respected children as whole people. Once he understood that making music for kids was important work, then he understood its value and the worth of pursuing it as an ambition. He could give himself to it fully, embracing the idea that making music for kids is a “natural and wonderful tool for social and emotional learning.” Along the way, Raffi has sold millions of albums.
“I am just so honored,” he says, “that millions of families have taken me into their homes and that tens of millions of children have listened to my songs. So many of them are ‘Beluga Grads.’”
One of Raffi’s most popular songs from his career is “Baby Beluga.” It’s probably been listened to billions of times since its release in the ‘90s. Now, many of the children who enjoyed it as kids have their own families. Kids are now parents with their own lives, raising their own kids, often with the help of Raffi’s songs. Raffi and his creative team estimate there are between 30 and 50 million Beluga Grads in North America.
And those grads are also exposed to Raffi’s current songwriting partner Lindsay Munroe, with whom he’s worked extensively over the past handful of years, with yet another new project slated for spring 2022. Raffi and Munroe, a musician and songwriter who is the mother of three children with autism, have been working on songs that reflect that experience. Their next release, which reinterprets the often dark nursery rhymes of yesteryear into newer more positive pieces, is a project in conjunction with Pam Gittleman, a Harvard University early childhood music educator.
“Most of the time,” Raffi says, “what’s important to me is instilling in these songs qualities—I don’t think of it simply as feel-good music. It’s not only feel good but [you want to] inspire them towards goodness. Kindness and compassion. Now, if you can dress all that up in playful, melodic songs, then you’ve got a winner on your hands.”
For Raffi, this work extends beyond songs, too. He’s even created a curriculum that helps others learn how they can advocate for young children. That effort began around 1997 when Raffi woke from sleep in the middle of the night with a philosophical concept that he’s been developing ever since. If you ask, Raffi may even recite the first line of his credo: We find these joys to be self-evident: That all children are created whole, endowed with innate intelligence, with dignity and wonder, worthy of respect. (For more visit the Raffi Foundation here.)
But while his work goes beyond music, it certainly started there. As such, today whenever Raffi feels down or confused or troubled, he goes back to those things in life that remain miracles: the existence of love, the existence of music, and the existence of children and childhood.
“I think it moves us so much and is probably the most powerful of any of the arts,” Raffi says, “because music is about vibration and we are vibratory creatures. When music is inspiring, it may move us to our core. Stir our hearts. That’s music that I cherish.”
Photo courtesy Waldmania PR
