Recess! Media

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That’s Bernardo Palombo with his “Song to Put a Doll to Sleep.” Fathers aren’t usually thought of as being the lullaby singers, the soothers at night, even though for centuries there have been volumes of rhymes and songs attributed to Father Goose, and certainly there have always been dads who have, in their tender, off-keyed ways managed to rasp out a “hush little baby” or two.

But a CD called “Papa’s Lullaby,” one of the remarkable series of lullaby collections put out by Ellipsis Arts, is offering us a very different tune. Here are old and new songs from Italy and Brasil, Sweden and India, Zimbabwe and Puerto Rico, that are reminding us through music of the nurturing presence that fathers also have in children’s lives. So, on Father’s Day this Sunday, let’s hear it for all the dads who make school lunches and fold the clothes and bandage a scraped knee, and who get up in the middle of the night and chase the bad dreams away, like Yakov Yavno, with a song:

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