the wheels on the bus

[I see that a lot of people have found their way to this page looking for guitar chords for ‘The Wheels on the Bus’. Here is a simple harmonisation of the version I know (there is a different one in an American book ‘Kids’ Songs 2′ which we have).
2 bars G – 1 bar A minor – 1 bar D
2 bars G – 1/2 bar A minor – 1/2 bar D – 1 bar G
This is in G – it could also be sung in F but anything lower is in my opinion too low (see my comments below).
Now read on … ]

My favourite among the tapes of children’s songs that we have is the BBC’s ‘The Wheels on the Bus’. It has the merit of being accompanied (as far as I can tell) mostly by real instruments, not a synthesiser, and the accompaniments are subtly varied in rhythm and instrumentation from verse to verse so that, subliminally, the listener’s interest is retained. The only longueur is a song called ‘I jump out of bed’, which I’ve never encountered elsewhere, in which the singer enumerates incrementally the first ten things they do in the morning, each of which is mentioned three times: ‘I brush my teeth, brush my teeth, brush my teeth….’. The children greet this with a shout of ‘It’s the boring one!’.

Another popular tape is one we bought in France, ‘Petites chansons pour tous les jours’ which accompanies a book of the same name. Here some of the songs are sung by children. The arrangements have a rather more sophisticated feel compared to the busking-style instrumentation on ‘The Wheels on the Bus’; one almost expects Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg to start crooning at any moment.

The book of ‘Petites chansons’ contains the melody line of the songs as well as the words, which shows up most English equivalents. Wishing to expose the children to musical notation at an early age, I scoured Blackwell’s children’s bookshop in Oxford to find a book of nursery rhymes which included music. The only one I could find was The Oxford Nursery Songbook, an updated edition of a work first published in the 1930’s, and I’m not sure that wasn’t in their music shop rather than the children’s bookshop. Comparison with bookshops overseas shows that music is included more routinely in French and German books of nursery songs.

I did see another book of such songs with music recently, but was horrified that the song on the cover went down to an A below middle C, with the high note being the C above middle C. Why is it thought desirable to force children’s naturally high voices to sing so low? The French book assumes a range of middle C to the second F above middle C, as does our Reclam edition of Kinderlieder, though the latter only goes above D for special effect. The Oxford Nursery Songbook has a similar range to these, though the modern edition adds guitar chords which are optionally in lower keys.