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MALVINA REYNOLDS
Recipient of the 1999 Magic Penny
Award
 The Magic Penny Award, named after the song by Malvina
Reynolds, is a Children's Music Network tribute to people in our
community who have dedicated their lives to empowering children
through music. CMN gives this award annually at our national
gatherings to honor the lifetime achievement of someone whose work most embodies our mission. In
October 1999 the first award was given posthumously to Malvina
herself, through her daughter, Nancy Schimmel.
Let's Go Dancing Til the Break of
Day:
A Remembrance of Malvina Reynolds
by Nancy Schimmel
From Pass It On! Issue #35
(Spring 2000)
My mother, Malvina Reynolds, once told me that when she was young,
she would lie in bed and imagine that she was onstage, dancing, with a
spotlight following her. She wanted to be a movie star, but she assumed
that that would never happen, so she decided she'd be a teacher instead
and work a smaller stage. Although she never actually taught except
briefly as a student in college, she did reach center stage in her own
way performing the songs she wrote. Malvina recorded 6 albums for adults
and 3 for children and kept writing and performing until a few days
before her death at the age of 77.
She was born in San Francisco on August 23, 1900. Music was always a
part of her life. To wake up his children in the morning, her father
would wind up the phonograph and play a record. Her parents didn't have
much money, but they saw to it that their children had violin lessons.
When Malvina and her brother grew up, they both played violin in dance
bands.
Malvina, who dreamt of being onstage and eventually realized that
dream, was a shy person. As she herself wrote,
I was a lonely child; I can't remember any friends in
grade school except Esther. Why she picked quiet, shy me for a friend,
I don't know. She was bold, laughing, quick. She would sit back of me
in school and slowly pull one hair out of my braid. Miss Geary would
say, "Hit her! With your ruler!" I never would. I liked Miss
Geary. I intended to be a teacher, and would be like her-a good
sport....I am still shy with people. I can easily face and talk with
and sing to a hundred or a thousand. But at a party, next to a
stranger, I haven't much to say.
Malvina found friends, but she didn't often find a group she fit
into:
The times I have been happiest were the rare times when I
was one of a gang....I had a kind of gang when we lived on Buchanan
Street [in San Francisco]. I must have been seven or eight. We would
sit in the light of the street lamp in the evening on the high wooden
flight of stairs, a dozen of us, and while the bigger boys played
"One Foot Off the Gutter," I would make up long stories to
tell the others. I don't remember what the stories were about, but
they must have been interesting; I can remember the young voices in
the evening, calling me to come out.
Malvina's world view was strongly shaped by hearing her parents
discuss politics with their friends. They were socialists, and she said
that that view "always made sense" to her. They were also
openly opposed to U.S. participation in the First World War, which they
considered an imperialist war. In fact, on the morning of her
high-school graduation exercises, Malvina was warned by a friendly
teacher that she and her cousin were to be refused their diplomas in
front of everybody because of her parents' political views.
I had first come to the attention of the principal's
office with a premature women's liberation movement on the school
grounds. At noon, the boys could leave the grounds to play around on
the streets and to get hot dogs, hamburgers, coffee, and pop at the
little store across the street. I circulated a petition that the girls
be allowed out of the yard at noon also. The answer was no. It wasn't
proper for girls to be on the street. [The girls then asked that the
boys be restricted, and were told] if the school tried to restrict the
boys they'd just climb the fence. Probably in the same situation now,
the girls would climb the fence. Then, nothing happened except that
quiet, shy me was fingered as a troublemaker.
It was while she was in high school that Malvina first met William
"Bud" Reynolds, at a socialist dance. He was a merchant
seaman, seven years older, handsome, and even more shy than she. He was
self-educated, having left school after the eighth grade. They read
poetry to each other in Golden Gate Park, but when he proposed, she
refused. Encouraged by her mother, she had her sights set on college and
a career. She got into the University of California at Berkeley without
a high-school diploma, and it was while doing graduate work in English
there that she did some student teaching. She used pop songs to teach
her high-school students about rhyme scheme and meter, as they were not
poetry readers.
Malvina found her "gang"-her compatible, accepting group -
in the English Department at UCB and stayed around to get "all the
degrees possible," as she says in Love It Like a Fool, the film
documentary made about her. She married someone else, and so did Bud. He
ran for governor of Michigan on the Socialist ticket, with the slogan,
"You provide the evictions, we'll provide the riots!" They
found each other again after she was divorced, and this time she said
yes.
My mother was writing her dissertation when I was little and got her
PhD in 1936. But it was the middle of the Depression; she was Jewish, a
socialist, and a woman; and she couldn't get a job teaching. But when
the Second World War broke out, she got a job on an assembly line in a
bomb factory, and Bud went to work as a carpenter in a shipyard.
My mother came from a long line of women who worked outside the home.
Her grandmother ran a deli while her husband read Torah. Her own mother
and father ran a naval tailor shop. When I was in the fifth grade, my
mother's father died, and she and my father and grandmother ran the shop
together.
While my father worked as a carpenter and organizer and ran the
family business with my mother, he also changed my diapers, and he made
breakfast most mornings. He encouraged and helped my mother in her
songwriting career, but he made the decisions about money. My mother
wasn't always happy with them. He died seven years before she did, and
while she missed him terribly, she told me it did give her a certain
satisfaction to be making her own business decisions.
 Malvina
had always written newspaper articles about her factory days, as well as
poems, stories, and the occasional song but she didn't begin songwriting
in earnest until she was about 45. A songwriting group had formed in Los
Angeles around Earl Robinson and the People's Songs crowd (the People's
Songs Bulletin was the forerunner of Sing Out! magazine.) Her first
songs were for adults. She did write "Magic Penny" early on,
but didn't think of it as a song for young children. She was writing the
line "Let's go dancing til the break of day" while I was at
one of those awkward junior-high dances. I'm sure she was wishing she
was dancing, too (my father didn't dance, and I was my mother's
folk-dance partner).
There were strong political statements made in many of my mother's
songs, but it was often done with humor, gentleness, and poetic images.
Of course the humor and gentleness were basic to her children's songs,
but she could make points there, too. For example, her song against drug
use, "It's Up To You," starts out whimsical, saying, "You
might have been born a ladybug, you might have been born a bat";
but it gets serious eventually, when it says, "You were born a
being with a mind and a voice, and the power of choice."
Although she gradually began to write more children's songs, Malvina
was careful to point out that she didn't exactly fit the stereotype of
the children's performer and songwriter. In a workshop on children's
music that she gave at the Pied Piper Music Festival in 1977, she said,
I don't think of myself primarily as a writer of
children's songs. In fact, I tend to avoid that title, because the
first thought is, you know, this nice old grandma who makes cookies
and sings for kids, and that's not my character at all. I have a very
acid edge toward many aspects of modern life, and I'm pretty outspoken
about it. I don't mind crossing swords with people when I disagree
with them, and I'm not your nice old grandma. However, I always make
it clear that the reason I have this sharp cutting edge is because I
do care for people. I care about children, and I think the world is
ripping them off, taking away their natural environment and much more
than that-the natural progression of their tradition-and leaving them
stripped, uneasy, uncomfortable, and in deep trouble, and it's because
of that that I'm so sharp.
Julie Thompson, producer of several of Malvina's albums, interviewed
her on the radio in Los Angeles in 1977. In answering a question about
children writing their own songs, Malvina said,
Now, the spoken voice has rhythm and a kind of
preliminary...melody line, and that's why we have national music,
because the music takes its rhythms and tunes from the spoken
language. That's why it's so hard to translate songs....When children
are playing or talking, they're often singing, and you can pick up on
something like that and turn it into a song. They love it, but they do
it themselves. They'll say, "Ha-ha, look what you did!" and
there's a little song, or, "Maaama-I don't want it," and
you've got a song.
Anything that's said expressively and with emphasis will
work, and if you let it ride on that, you'll find they'll be making up
songs in no time at all. If we take a constructive attitude...and
don't expect them to have perfect rhythm or perfect pitch...and don't
give them the idea that they can't do it, they will. My husband was
told that he couldn't sing. His family all had fine voices, and I
guess his wasn't as good. They used to make him shut up, and all of
his life he wouldn't sing, except when my daughter was a little bitty
girl. He would sing for her, and she thought he had the most beautiful
voice in the world!
In answer to a question about using traditional songs with children,
Malvina said,
People don't realize that many of these lovely, clever,
funny children's songs that have come down to us are not transmitted
from parent to child, but from one generation of children to another.
The younger ones hear the older ones sing the songs, play the games,
and make up the instruments, and then they carry it on to the next
generation. And it's a whole world of its own.
A great many songs now are created for children by
grown-ups, but I try myself to get into a purer frame of mind when I'm
singing for them, in the sense that I'm trying to speak directly and
not let a whole lot of overcivilizing, overperfecting, or mechanical
influences get between me and the listener. So perhaps some of my
songs will someday get to be part of that kind of tradition, which I
would love to see happen.
Copyright 2000 Nancy Schimmel
Nancy Schimmel is a storyteller, author, and award-winning
songwriter (a late bloomer in this regard, as her mother was), living in
Berkeley, California.
Note: Much of the material quoted in this article is taken from a
radio interview and notes from a workshop on children's music given by
Malvina at the 1977 Pied Piper Music Festival. These are used with
permission from Nancy Schimmel. The entire interview and notes appear in
Patty Zeitlin's book, A Song Is a Rainbow (Scott, Foresman, 1982). Other
quotes are taken from Malvina's unfinished autobiography.
More info from Nancy Schimmel about
her mother, Malvina Reynolds
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