Recess! Media

It’s Mother’s Day this Sunday. The American holiday began in 1907 in Philadelphia, as a way to remember a mother who had passed away, and it has become since then an occasion to honor all mothers. On a CD called Mama’s Lullaby, some splendid music in the air, from all over the world, to celebrate moms today — like the traditional song from Cameroon, sung by Marylou Seba, in “Mba Mon,” about the kindness of the universal woman who cares for us all:

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Mothers, as we know, can we do almost anything. In Romania, she dips you in the water from a special fountain so that you’ll meet your good fairy. In Siberia, she hires the cat to rock you late at night. In the Ukraine, she sets you in your cradle, in the boughs of an apple tree, where you are lulled to sleep by the wind and the singing birds. In Ireland, she keeps her child, whom she calls her dove, from being spirited away by other wordly creatures, as Padraigin Ni Uallachain sings in “An Colm”

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And in one Italian cradle song, sung by Marina del Gaudio, mother can even make up a waltz about a cat and a will-of-the-whisp that chase away the mosquito that’s buzzing around the nose of someone trying to sleep:

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