Ting-A-Lay-O: A Song History

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"Tingalayo" is a lively donkey song presented as traditional Caribbean in the sources consulted here, though the sources consulted here do not pin it to one island or date; a British schools song bank calls it "thought to be traditional Caribbean."[1] The earliest printing found here is "Tinga Layo (Donkey Song)," the second number in Calypso Songs of the West Indies, a 1943 folio credited to Massie Patterson and Lionel Belasco.[2] Maurice Baron of New York issued it with his own free transcriptions and an English version by Olga Paul.[3] A 1948 federal court opinion, written about another song in the same folio, explains how the set came together: Patterson, a professional singer, approached Belasco, a pianist the court ranked among the leading composers of the West Indies, for calypsos in 1941, and the two later performed them for Baron, who wrote them down and printed them with Creole and English words.[4]

Watercolor of a white wall topped with red flowers, the blue sea and a distant sail beyond it.

Winslow Homer, A Wall, Nassau, watercolor and graphite on paper, 1898. A garden wall by the sea in Nassau, Bahamas, painted in 1898, shown for the song's Caribbean roots; the watercolor has no connection to the song.

In later decades the song found its main audience among children. Raffi recorded it as "Tingalayo" on his 1985 album One Light, One Sun, in an arrangement credited to him and Ken Whiteley.[5] Crown then published it in 1989 as a Raffi Songs to Read picture book, illustrated by Kate Duke, in which the donkey gives his master the slip and heads for the fair; the book also prints the music.[6] For mountain dulcimer, it closes the song list of Maureen Sellers's My Teaching Book For Appalachian Dulcimer, Volume Two, the 56-page second half of her two-volume instruction book, published by Fingers Of Steel.[7]

Our book that contains the song "Ting-A-Lay-O"

Sources

  1. Sing Up: "Tingalayo".
  2. Chicago Public Library: "Calypso Songs of the West Indies".
  3. The Morgan Library & Museum: "Calypso Songs of the West Indies, by Massie Patterson and Lionel Belasco".
  4. vLex: "Baron v. Leo Feist, Inc., 78 F. Supp. 686 (S.D.N.Y. 1948)".
  5. New York Public Library: "One Light, One Sun".
  6. Mercyhurst University Library: "Tingalayo".
  7. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, My Teaching Book For Appalachian Dulcimer, Volume Two".
  8. Image: Winslow Homer, A Wall, Nassau, watercolor and graphite on paper, 1898. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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