Happy Thanksgiving!
As I thought of what to share this week, naturally the USA holiday of Thanksgiving came to mind and I wanted to do something to supplement this yummy holiday. I did a little research to find out what kind of music the Pilgrims would have been familiar with and I found this free, older book in the public domain on the very subject, “Music of the Pilgrims“. I drew the melody on page 34 (labeled page 30 in the book), for Psalms 5, and color coded it in today’s handout. Also of interest is this article from the Plymouth Plantation.
Do you know what they ate at the original harvest feast in 1621? It’s not quite the same as what we have today. We once tried their cornmeal mush sweetened with molasses, and while it didn’t look very good, my kids actually really enjoyed it. I wrote this fun little song to help you teach kids about what that first meal was like.
A note on the colors: For those not familiar with Movable Do, it is based on relative pitch. The first melody is in E major, so “Do” is “E”. I colored all the E’s red for “Do”, and so forth. Do you see the familiar “Do-Mi-So” pattern in the melody? Red, yellow and blue? The second melody is in C major, so I likewise colored the C’s red for Do.
