A lesson from the very young: Why Raffi could be what the world needs right now

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Kids love saying the name Raffi.

At the height of his fame, the children’s troubadour would be mobbed by young listeners when he arrived in a new city. “‘There’s Waffyyyyy!!!‘” they would shriek as he exited his cab.

The name “Raffi” has appeared on about 15 million album covers and, more to the point for his largely illiterate fan base, been wailed from the laps of countless parents in concert halls around the world.

Fellow preschool superstar Fred Penner is still in awe of the name’s power: “He had a perfect name. The two-syllable name that every child could say. ‘Raffi. Raffi. Raffi.’”

Before it was a toddler’s incantation or a marketing gold mine, the name represented a kind of private friend – for me, anyway. The sound of Raffi’s voice cooing from the tape deck in my parents’ Volkswagen Jetta is one of my first musical memories. Songs such as All I Really Need, Baby Beluga and Bananaphone imprinted themselves on my brain, then lay dormant for 25 years.

A couple of months ago, I started noticing Raffi again. I’d be scrolling through Twitter and there he would be, with the familiar beatific smile, delivering some slashing critique of the Trump administration. At first, it was a shock. This was the man who invented the phrase “bananular phone,” demanding the “fascist” “orange” “fuhrer” resign.

The name he used online was an even bigger surprise. His profile said not just Raffi, but “Raffi Cavoukian.” I found myself thinking: “Raffi has a last name?!” It was hard to imagine that he belonged to a particular time and place. In my mind, he inhabited a sliver of twilit childhood consciousness, remote and otherworldly, like the man in the moon.

It made me want to know more about this enigmatic figure, both superfamous and oddly neglected, whom I felt I knew deeply and not at all – someone beloved by millions but still reaching out to strangers on the internet.

I e-mailed his publicist, hardly believing that the man in the moon had a publicist.

The four-year-old in me is freaking out. The sight of Raffi on my laptop causes my face to do a weird twitchy thing. I’ve interviewed Justin Trudeau before and this is more nerve-wracking.

Raffi is sitting in his big, light-filled house on British Columbia’s Salt Spring Island with his borderdoodle, Luna. When I tell him I’m star-struck, he laughs a big, head-thrown-back laugh that says both “Wow!” and “I can actually see that.”

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Adult fans go wobbly in his presence all the time. The novelist Sheila Heti wrote about Raffi in New York magazine a few years ago and began by describing how turned on she was. (“A tremendous volt of electricity went through my body, and my body said yes.”) When Raffi met Trudeau in Ottawa about a decade ago, it was Trudeau who gushed: “‘I know every word of every song on Singable Songs For The Very Young.‘”

The Prime Minister and Heti are both “beluga grads” – Raffi’s term for people who grew up listening to his music. Based on album sales and the size of the average family, he estimates the “pod” has up to 50 million members. “It’s an amazing number,” he says, making no effort to conceal his awe.

During COVID-19, however, his fame has become a mixed blessing. Being well-known, it turns out, makes isolation all the more difficult. There are always fans in normal times: the mother in the grocery store who asks for a selfie, or the shoppers who pay court at his regular table in the farmer’s market. But when we first spoke – initiating more than a month of regular Zoom calls – B.C. was in near-total lockdown, and all of that was over.

Raffi has been divorced since 1990 and doesn’t have kids. It’s just him and his dog. At times this spring, he had to will himself off the couch and hug Luna for comfort. “You just get through the day,” he said, his jowls shaded with stubble. “I’ve deeply missed the social comfort.” This from the man who taught a generation to shake their sillies out. It was hard to see.

One way Raffi has coped is by making art. Back in March he recorded a short PSA about physical distancing, sung in the style of Bob Dylan. (Sample lyric: “Quarantine, quarantine/ On account of COVID-19.”) The great American cellist Yo-Yo Ma recently played on a 40th anniversary recording of the song Baby Beluga. (“His people contacted my people,” Raffi explained, in a mock-tycoon voice.)

An advantage of putting out music right now, when the touch of another person’s skin can feel like a faint memory, is that you get a response. The reaction from listeners on Twitter has helped penetrate his confinement.

“I do appreciate people writing to me, trying to comfort me at times,” he said. “Even as I’m trying to comfort them.”

There is an irony in Raffi’s loneliness at this particular moment: With schools and camps closed, the need for children’s entertainment is more acute than ever. Randi Hampson, vice-president of operations and new projects for Elephant Records, notes that online demand for kids’ programming is way up. “There’s definitely a hunger,” she said.

That hunger owes something to Raffi himself. Lullabies are as old as music, but Raffi helped forge a different kind of relationship between artist, kids and parents – something more intimate and lasting, something that could be called fandom. In the historical timeline of children’s entertainment, there is before Raffi, and after.

He was born in Cairo, in 1948, and raised amid a thriving Armenian community. His father, a portrait photographer, took the three children to lunch at the base of the Pyramids on weekends. But the Cavoukian family were forced to flee Egypt amid rising Arab nationalism when Raffi was 10.

“How we suffered,” his parents would tell him after they settled in Toronto. He suffered, too, at the hands of Canadian schoolchildren who made fun of his foreign-sounding name.

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One way Raffi escaped the confines of this difficult new life was through folk music, his brother Onnig told me. Inspired by the Yorkville coffeehouse scene that nurtured Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, Raffi started making his own music. For years, he struggled to find traction with an adult audience, until his then-mother-in-law, a teacher, invited him to perform at her school. It was a hit, and gave rise to an improbable career.

Raffi’s first album, Singable Songs For The Very Young, went on to sell more than a million copies. Recorded in a ranch house near Hamilton on almost no budget, it was released at the precise moment the world was ready for it. North America was on the verge of a children’s music revolution. In the 1970s, conscientious Boomers seeking high-quality products for their kids, from sugar-free cereal to educational TV shows, were making hits out of Sesame Street and Marlo Thomas’s Free To Be… You and Me.

Other children’s entertainers still view Raffi as a pioneer – someone who proved you could make it big with pared-down arrangements and emotional sincerity, rather than shrill antics.

“He really did pave the way for children’s music to be on the centre stage,” said Janice Hubbard, a long-time member of the kids’ group Parachute Express. “It wasn’t rock and roll; it wasn’t trying to pull kids in with bells and whistles. There was a purity about him.”

For all of Raffi’s mellow bonhomie with kids, he was always a careful and savvy businessman. In the mid-’80s, his record label, Troubadour, dropped every other artist to focus on promoting its biggest star in the U.S. market, Penner recalled.

“It was not a surprise when Raffi cleared house to prepare for the American onslaught,” said Penner, who was part of the cull. “He built the Canadian machine, then he built the American machine.” (Raffi remembers the split differently. “He wanted to go his own way,” he said of Penner. “It was all very friendly.”)

In the United States, Raffi would have wider horizons and even more illustrious colleagues. He met Mr. Rogers in the early ’90s when they were both slated to perform at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration. It was a thrill to meet such a “towering presence of kindness,” Raffi said. But when I asked what he talked about with the icon of neighbourliness, Raffi drew a blank. A lot of other people were there, he said. “Kermit the Frog was there!”

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This was a time of transition. Raffi was the most popular children’s singer in the English-speaking world, but he was also getting divorced, moving to the West Coast and throwing himself into the fight against climate change. From then on he would identify as much with the David Suzukis of the world as with the Kermit the Frogs. The charity he founded, the Raffi Foundation for Child Honouring, aims to raise awareness about the connection between the environment and children’s rights.

Like many well-off residents of Salt Spring, he tries to walk the walk: eating local wild salmon, driving an electric car. When his phone dinged on one of our Zoom calls, it turned out to be his groundskeeper announcing that he’d found a baby bird in the garage. “That’s so cool!” Raffi said.

The bird in the garage marked a turning point in our talks. At first, technical challenges seemed to mirror the difficult emotional landscape we were trying to cross together. His audio wasn’t working on the initial Zoom session. I said: “I’ve been listening to you all my life and now I can’t hear you!” He laughed at that, but from my perspective he was silent, stuck in a digital pantomime.

Talking about fame was difficult for other reasons: It seemed to embarrass him. When we lingered too long on the subject one time, he did a little gesture I would come to recognize as his way of interrupting uncomfortable moments: He blew on a wooden train whistle. The instrument gave out a goofy too-tooooo sound. He chuckled. “I can make that sound with my throat.”

But as quarantine wore on, then loosened, Raffi seemed to achieve a measure of peace. Regular meditation made “the incessant thoughts and mental chatter just drop away for a moment.” Going to the gym also energized him, he said, showing off a disconcertingly pumped bicep. (”It’s just the lighting, man,” he insisted.)

Talking to Raffi and listening to his music turned out to be therapeutic for me as well. He always understood that playfulness is just one aspect of childhood. To the very young, life also feels deadly serious – a place from which there’s no detachment – and many of his album tracks are surprisingly soulful, full of yearning, nostalgia and even a hint of pain. It was an emotional landscape that suddenly felt familiar again. Something about the uncertainty caused by the virus reminded me of being a kid. I was eating more Popsicles. I missed my mother. One night, unable to sleep, I mentally sang myself Raffi’s rendition of the African-American spiritual Michael Row the Boat Ashore. (”Halleluuu. Yuh.”)

When I asked Raffi what made his music resonate with young people, the question seemed to wrong-foot him a little. “Kids are fascinated by animals,” he said at first, distracted by his phone. “Animal sounds are always good.” But eventually he warmed to the theme. He began talking about the need to respect the child “as a whole person,” and to remember their limited life experience. It’s also important to make music with love, he said, because kids can tell if you mean it. “The love has to be right there in your voice.”

Now he was on to something. I thought about sitting in the back seat of my parents’ Jetta, hearing Raffi sing “Hallelujah” like he really meant it, with a seriousness that said it’s both a burden and a gift to be alive – and I thought, “That’s right. The love has to be right there in your voice.”

The more we spoke, the less Raffi’s solitude seemed bleak or depressing. Maybe it was his calm, low-wattage smile, with those moony eyes and mask-like beard, which always looked so reassuring on his album covers.

His voice probably helped reassure me, too: so smooth and vital and golden, but wearing its texture and history where you can see them – like a nice piece of treated wood. How could someone so capable of projecting good feeling into the world be unhappy, I reasoned.

Raffi puts out an album every few years, but he no longer seems too concerned with sales. Musical ideas just tumble out of him, ready or not. In late July, he recorded an homage to anti-racist protesters in the U.S. northwest called Portland Moms, which Billboard magazine accurately described as “jaunty.”

The recent work can be uneven, but over the years Raffi has proven himself to be a kind of virtuoso. Canadian folklorist Sheldon Posen compared him to Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra – a great musical interpreter, someone who can take a song and make their version definitive.

Posen saw Raffi perform at a school in Ottawa once and still remembers it ecstatically. The children weren’t responding to a name or a business strategy. They were hearing love, right there in the voice.

“He doesn’t have to ask them, he doesn’t have to exhort them – they just start singing,” Posen recalled. “To hear those little voices sing along – it’s totally magic.”

The Raffi song I’ve been singing most often – at my desk, while making lunch – is an off-kilter ballad called The Changing Garden of Mr. Bell. It appears on the Bananaphone album but has a disarming seriousness about it. The lyrics are from the perspective of a child; his neighbour, Mr. Bell, is from a “foreign place,” lives alone, and tends a garden full of asters and honeybees. One day, the narrator notices a picture of a family on the older man’s mantle, and asks about it. Mr. Bell replies cryptically, with a kind of koan about the ever-changing garden.

The song suggests trauma in the neighbour’s past, and invites the question of why he lives alone. But it isn’t a song about a lonely old man.

Instead, it becomes a tribute to someone who has imparted a sense of wonder and a few helpful ideas to a young friend – a friend who won’t soon forget Mr. Bell, or his musical, memorable name.

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