The Springsteen of the Preschool Set Returns

Oh, sure, little Elmo can win a Grammy, and celebrities can keep on making those now almost obligatory children’s albums, but there’s been only one bona fide superstar of children’s music. Remember Raffi?

This week, the single-monikered, mellow-voiced, doe-eyed, neatly bearded Canadian’s first new album in seven years is being released by Rounder Records. “I’d been away from it too long, and there were some songs knocking on the door that I had to pay attention to,” Raffi said from the offices of his Vancouver-based Troubadour Records company.

The deceptively simple songs on his new “Let’s Play!” CD--a cozy “Swing” song, a lyrical expansion of “Eensy Weensy Spider,” a Tibetan children’s song--have a vintage Raffi feel, in the sweet and playful mode of his 23-year-old signature anthem, “Baby Beluga.” Renditions of “Yellow Submarine” and “What a Wonderful World” are in the same vein; so is the folk song “May There Always Be Sunshine,” recorded at Broadway’s Gershwin Theatre in 1993, and included “partly as a gesture to the people of New York,” Raffi said.

The title track’s invitation to come and play “on this jazzy Django day”--a nod to guitar legend Django Reinhardt--is the album’s primary message, however.

“Many adults don’t understand how busy children are making sense of the world,” Raffi said. “That is their work and they do it through play, making sense of the world outside of them and the world of feelings and emotions.

“We should never lose our playful side,” he added. “I think we do so at too great a cost.”

Raffi learned that lesson firsthand. He had to rediscover his own playful spirit in the early 1990s, after a period of turmoil that included a career misstep and the breakup of his marriage.

Dubbed “the Springsteen” of the preschool set by Newsweek, Cairo-born, Armenian Raffi, 53, had also been compared to Elvis, for his phenomenal impact on the children’s music scene in the 1970s and ‘80s. In 1989, when he decided to take a break from touring, scalpers sold tickets to his “farewell” concert at Carnegie Hall for as much as $300.

Critics and confused parents turned sour in 1990, though, when Raffi attempted to express his growing, save-the-environment activism in “Evergreen, Everblue,” an ecology-themed MCA release for adults. As a measure of his clout, however, he led the way in changing how CDs were packaged.

“I think people forget that he was the first artist to insist that his stuff be released without a long box,” said rock critic Moira McCormick, who covers children’s music for Billboard magazine. “They like to think that it was Sting or Bono or somebody, but it was Raffi.”

(Raffi, who refuses corporate sponsorships and product tie-ins, now insists that paper used for his books and album liner notes be printed on chlorine-free paper.)

When a newly energized Raffi made a 50-city U.S. comeback tour in 1993, released new children’s albums in 1994 and 1995, and toured the U.S. again though the mid- and late 1990s, he and his music were received with enthusiasm by new crops of young fans.

And, despite the proliferation of children’s music artists swimming in his wake, Raffi’s multiple gold and platinum albums remain staple fare in preschools and kindergarten classrooms.

“There would be no children’s music industry as we know it without him,” McCormick said. “He was the one who instituted the major changes in how kids’ artists are perceived, by working with sophisticated, professional musicians, using sophisticated adult pop arrangements and the latest production techniques, so that his music would be palatable to the discerning ears of parents.”

He hasn’t been forgotten, said Paul Foley, Rounder Records’ general manager.

Lack of radio play, even on Radio Disney, with a play list dominated by teen pop, is “disappointing,” Foley said, but “Raffi has been able to transcend that. It’s been word-of-mouth and parents and grandparents ... are still passing it on.

“Raffi is always the most asked-about artist on Rounder’s roster,” he said. “People are always saying, ‘Is there a new one this year? Is there a new one this year?’ Just on the sales side, Raffi has 10 out of the top 25-selling children’s catalog titles every week of the year, despite the fact that he hasn’t had a record in seven years.”

For Raffi, the break has meant time to “broaden the canvas.” The more relaxed, “inspired and awake” Raffi is very much in evidence in “Arbutus Baby” (with noted fiddler Natalie MacMaster) and “It Takes a Village,” songs that reflect his activism without losing sight of his young fan base.

He also used the time between albums to write his autobiography. “Raffi, The Life of a Children’s Troubadour,” published in 1999, is a decidedly adult account of a life that spans a rigidly authoritarian upbringing, his escape as a beaded, bearded hippie and the consciousness-raising that led to his work in global forums as an advocate for a healthy environment and the well-being of children. His nonprofit Troubadour Institute supports worldwide efforts to protect and nurture children.

“If the idea of giving priority attention to young children’s needs was taken seriously,” Raffi said, “it could [benefit] everyone. There’s a unifying principle in the fact that all young children have the same irreducible needs--for love, for respect, for shelter--and this can be a hopeful vision for the world. If we embrace it, a child may truly lead us and bring us together.”