The Okee Dokee Brothers. (Alex Johnson of Alex Johnson Photography, Matt Fern)
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The banality of much children’s music can drive a parent bananas, so discovering the Okee Dokee Brothers was a real treat. My son has loved camping since he was a baby, so I when I saw an album titled Can You Canoe? in the children’s section of the library about two years ago, it seemed like an obvious thing to grab. And so began our fandom for the Minneapolis-based band, who play folk music that is fun and genuinely good.
I’m Denise Balkissoon, a columnist at The Globe and Mail. When I picked up my first Okee Dokee Brothers album, my son was only 3. At the time, the entire idea of music was new to him, and watching him fall in love with a song or an artist was simply cute. Today, though, music – and other media, such as books and TV – are about a lot more than that. My son is 5 now, and I’m more aware than ever that everything he consumes is shaping the way he sees the world.
The first three Okee Dokee albums are accompanied by DVDs of mini-movies, in which musicians Justin Lansing and Joe Mailander (I’ll call them by their first names, like my son does) goof around while exploring the great outdoors. That in itself is a message that I’m happy to get behind. But in the past few years of listening (and listening and listening) to the Brothers’ music, I’ve increasingly appreciated their kid-friendly approach to some complicated topics.
Joe and Justin are straight men who clearly value their long, intimate friendship: “We’ve known one another since I can recall,” goes the song Brother, “Times we fly, times we fall.” They’re middle-class white Americans, but take care, in their songs and videos, to introduce their audience to the people whose music has long echoed in the beautiful landscapes that they’re paddling, hiking and riding horses through.
That means meeting a lot of cool people. As they tour Appalachia for Through the Woods, they meet up with storied musician David Holt, who teaches them about “mountain music,” like how to use a paper bag as an instrument. And when they went to the Navajo Nation to sing alongside black-Indigenous musician Radmilla Cody for the video that accompanies their third album, Saddle Up, I got seriously choked up.
It’s a balancing act, teaching my son about the world’s ugly prejudices while also letting him be a kid. To be honest, finding movies and TV that satisfy both of us is difficult. It’s ridiculous that in 2019, so many cartoon shows still have just one token girl character, but good books are easier to find. Adding the lighthearted classic Heather Has Two Mommies to our collection was a simple decision, but I’m careful about which heavier stories we read together, and when.
I think the best ones are compelling but vague enough that I can offer an explanation that seems right at the time. Some beautiful examples are When We Were Alone, a picture book about residential schools illustrated by Cree artist Julie Flett, and Back of the Bus, about a little boy playing marbles when he sees his neighbour (who adults will recognize as Rosa Parks) get arrested on the city bus.
Even so, at some point hurtful truths will become clear: I tell my son that it’s okay to be sad and confused, because honestly, I am too. Here’s a video of When We Were Alone author David A. Robertson talking about addressing difficult subjects with kids and age-appropriate answers for hard questions. If children ask him what happened to residential school students who didn’t listen, for example, he asks what happens when they don’t listen at home or at school. “They’ll say ‘I get a consequence’ or ‘I get a time out,’" he says, "and I would just say ‘okay, well when the kids didn’t listen, they got a consequence as well.’”
There are books that try to frame difficult issues for children but fall short of the mark. I won’t name them, but some attempts to be clever come across as corny, and some are way too harsh, even mean, as they try to teach grade schoolers the idea that they have privileges that other people don’t. Making enjoyable, meaningful art for children is a real skill, and it’s obvious when creators focus on the lecture over the audience.
Which brings me back to the Okee Dokee Brothers, whose most recent release, Winterland, is perfect for right now. It’s about snow, ice-fishing and fireplaces, but also the inevitable circle of life. It reflects their own new experiences of the world, such as how becoming a dad affected the way Joe sees gender, which he wrote about for Fatherly last November.
After he and his wife had their son, everyone brought them blue-coloured gifts. “We were very grateful, but it did get me thinking: Why do we have to wear our genders?” he writes. He goes on to explain how as a little boy, he had a penchant for his sister’s pink jellies and her sparkly unitard, and absolutely no reservations about it. “Then, in Jr. High and High School, I started feeling pressure to wear football jerseys, give fist bumps, and listen to Kid Rock," he writes. “Was it just me? Was it my parents? Was it our culture at the time?"
These ideas make their way into the delightful song Snowpeople: “Why do we roll up circles just to put them inside a square?” the song asks. “Showing them who they should be, by telling them what they can wear.”
The message is a gentle nudge, not an order, which is why children love it, and why it just might work.
What else we’re reading:
Has a friend or neighbour tried to sell you toiletries or jewellery? Worse, have they tried to get you to sell the stuff too? Multilevel marketing, as it’s called, has exploded since the innocent days of Tupperware parties. This Washington Post story on the phenomenon has a lot of good gossip about how particularly eager sellers can ruin their relationships, but also great analysis of how these pyramid schemes prey on women’s economic vulnerabilities.
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