Tirra lirra, little John!
Tirra lirra, tiny Bill!
Take my hurdy-gurdy, boys; …
Sing and play and sing again; …
But be sure, my little boys,
That you make a joyful noise!
(Richards, Tirra Lirra v, ll. 1–3; 6; 9–10)

1Laura E. Richards, best known for her children’s poetry, not only wrote poems. For many of these poems, she also composed melodies often adapted and modernized from traditional songs. Moreover, she wanted children­­—girls and boys alike—to partake in musical practice, as the above-quoted dedication to “Two Very Young Gentlemen” (v) namely her youngest grandchild John and her eldest great-grandchild William, shows as well as many passages in her second autobiography Stepping Westward (1931), where she gives several accounts of special musical gatherings. In one of her more general musings on the practice of songs and singing in that autobiography, she notably equates the birth of her children to writing songs: “Four years saw the birth of the first three of my seven children, Alice, Rosalind, and Henry Howe; saw, contemporary with these births, the acquisition of my hurdy gurdy” (155–156). Belittlingly calling her songs “hurdy gurdy,” she also relates her babies’ noises to an endless inspiration of musical melodies: “I had always rhymed easily; now, with the coming of babies … came a prodigious welling up of rhymes, mostly bringing their tunes (or what passed for tunes; the baby, bless it, knew not better!) with them. I wrote, and sang, and wrote, and could not stop” (156). The passage mentions poems such as “The Shark,” “The Queen of the Orkney Islands,” and “Little John Bottlejohn,” the latter of which she proudly singles out since the Scottish-American Journal published a review by J. Clark Murray referring to that song in 1885. The review is noteworthy because it provides information on the song’s compositional background:

The song deals with an ancient theme [i.e. mermaids, R.J.P.] which has been frequently treated, not only in older Scottish ballads, but in the earlier literature of all European nations. The song itself bears all the impress of a very modern composition, for it strikes me as treating the mermaid myth in a spirit of fun. (qtd. in Stepping 157)

1. Boys Singing

3The 2019 rendition of “Antonio,” performed by the South Shore Children’s Chorus Training Choir at St. Clare Parish in Braintree, MA, does not use Richards’s original composition, but contemporary American composer Jay Broeker’s (“Antonio—SSCC Training Choir”). The video shows a lively children’s chorus that on closer inspection reveals a striking gender imbalance: It is the girls that mainly participate enthusiastically while the boys seem much less engaged. After some circling that captures the entirety of the choir, the camera then repeatedly returns to one boy who hardly sings, zooming in on his face and showing close-up expressions that range from boredom (yawning) to inattention (raising arms, shaking head) to irritation (rolling eyes) to annoyance (sticking out tongue). What is going on? All his gestures suggest that he seems uncomfortable and feels out of place. While the girls are energetic and participate joyfully, he—like most other boys, who are much less expressive compared to him, however—displays a deliberately uninvolved and even forcibly flippant attitude. Is it because he thinks singing is a girls’ thing?

4Indeed, the boy’s reactions correlate to recent research findings that show that there is a striking “absence of boys’ participation in singing at school” that is coupled with “negative attitudes toward singing commonly held by adolescent boys” (Hall 6). Adam Adler even suggests that “[m]any boys make a decision not to sing between elementary and secondary school, in response to psychological and sociological messages that singing is not an appropriate activity for males beyond a certain age” (qtd. in Hall 6). In a similar vein, reading poetry as an essential activity in English classes can be perceived as feminizing in the eyes of many boys, since such classes foster distance for them “by their focus on the expression of emotions, their apparent irrelevance to men’s work, the lack of set rules and unique answers, and the contrast with activities defined as properly masculine, such as sport” (Connell 158).

5Has this attitude—if sustainable at all—always been the case? Besides male dominance in certain musical contexts such as the contemporary music industry and within styles such as jazz, rock, and rap, boys’ singing certainly has been revered as proper or even privileged masculine behavior in other contexts such as boys’ church choir traditions. Therefore, singing and reading poetry per se need not be a practice labeled feminine as the undisputed participation of males in present-day poetry slams proves, for instance. However, there are voices that still adhere to gender-stereotypical behaviors and attitudes in this regard: “Boys in our society are expected to be masculine. In fact, our society demands that boys be rough, tough, and full of action. They are supposed to avoid anything that borders on being a sissy .… Poetry is often considered non-masculine and boys frequently express their dislike for poetry” (Hartley 1153). Such cultural preconceptions seem outdated and by reproducing discriminatory slurs inappropriately homophobic to say the least.

7Asking about this particular and contemporary crisis in relation to its historical correlate, I return to the resisting boy in the video and resume my questioning of his behavior: Is he uncomfortably showing outsiderness, an unlikely victim of being pressured into a feminizing activity within an educational context that according to the chorus’ homepage lauds its inclusivity, “a safe space to learn, grow, and to find your unique voice” (“South Shore Children’s Chorus”)? Or is he willfully staging his ‘failure’ to conform to a code of ‘good’ boyish conduct and reveling in his ‘bad boy’ performance, instead? Rather than ultimately trying to determine his behavior, I want to broaden the scope and consider it within the persistent longevity of an educational discourse on
‘boys’ crises’ reaching back for more than a century that some claim to be “non-existent, overblown, or, at most, limited to minority boys” (Kleinfeld 113). Others discuss such boys’ educational under-performance and resistance to normative masculine expectations in terms of a timeless “lovable loser” scenario that “reveals that what is sometimes most hegemonic are masculine positions that are knowingly non-heroic or ordinary, that is, the self-reflexive varieties that causally and playfully parody traditional male stereotypes” (Korobov 125).

9Such ironic questioning of gender norms recurs in some other poems of Richards’s such as “A Spanish Ballad” and “Camberwell Beauty,” but especially “My Japanese Fan” that even lends itself to a queer reading (Gordon Ginzburg, “Queering” 394), but also in Richards’s self-conception as a woman, mother, and artist when she writes:

By and by, when my first baby came, I felt that every canon of duty and propriety demanded that I should make her a dress; cut and make it, all myself. I did, and she wore it, poor lamb, being unable to defend herself; but after that I said to myself, ‘Whatever your hands were made for, it was not this!’ I laid down the scissors and took up the pen. (Stepping 17–18)

2. Merryweather Boys’ Summer Camp

MERRYWEATHER
Now all you bold Campers,
Come list to the song, …
With their gallant commander,
The Skipper by name.
MY husband’s Camp title of “Skipper” dates far back of Merryweather; … I have always claimed the title of First Mate, as my mother did before me. “There can be only one Captain in a ship!” she would say. (Stepping 304)

12While Richards’s autobiography aims at an adult audience, the Merryweather chapter deals with boys’ experience and education, and already the chapter’s opening manifests a hierarchy both in terms of gender and age that mirrors “the models of masculinity and femininity codified in children’s literature” around 1900—without questioning them (Reynolds 50). On the contrary, besides acknowledging her own inferior female position, she asserts the endurance of the homosocial “spirit of team play” as based on “Absolute Despotism,” which in turn calls for absolute obedience on behalf of the boys. The rigorous educational norms and rules seem universal and everlasting:

Except for various extensions and amplifications, there has been little material change since 1900. It is the same place; any first-year boy would recognize it; and—we hope and believe—the same spirit pervades it; the spirit of team play, of brotherhood.
Rules were laid down—not too many, we hoped. A camp, like a nursery, must be an Absolute Despotism.
‘No whying, boy, but do as you are bid!’ (Stepping 305)

13Expanding from her personal experience, Richards’s description reflects broader cultural attitudes towards gender and education during her time. Her pronounced attitude certainly adheres to the social ideal at the turn of the century of boys being instructed in masculine virtues such as loyalty, stoicism, athleticism, confidence, and courage. The passing on of a despotic male leadership—which paradoxically included Richards herself linguistically “cross-dressed” as “mate” as well as her daughters—as the superior masculine model to the growing-up boys may not have consciously fostered misogyny, but “such institutions created an ethos which valued male friendships, interests and attributes above all things female” (Reynolds 56). What Kimberley Reynolds describes for late-Victorian and Edwardian England, for instance the unease about whether boys had “become soft” and were turning into “men less manly” (58), is mirrored in anxieties among American men of being feminized partly because of the predominance of women in the lives and education of boys. This in turn caused “[b]y the end of the century, a massive, nationwide health and athletics craze … as men compulsively attempted to develop manly physiques as a way of demonstrating that they possessed the interior virtues of manhood” (Kimmel 82). Richards’s downplaying of her rather dominant female position at the camp might well reflect this predicament since, accordingly, she also adheres to her husband’s patriarchal command to make “‛Good Campers’ (our highest praise!) of our boys, after the general principles of team play—and truth, and courage, and kindness—watermanship occupies the highest rank” (Stepping 319).

14In line with these principles is the preparation for the boys’ later public roles as businessmen or soldiers. Especially the “Scouting Game” that Richards extensively writes about is crucial in this respect since it is a war game that, as the boys’ chorus of Richards’s Scouting Song applauds, is all about bravery and solidarity, muscle and morality: “We’ll all go a-scouting to-day / The braves are a-thirst for the fray! / So we’ll sharpen our darts, / And we’ll strengthen our hearts, / And we’ll all go a-scouting to-day” (Stepping 318). Even more, the game uncannily turns out to be a provision for survival on the World War I battlefields of France. Referring to her son, Richards notes that having been trained to keep his “nose to ground … [m]y son felt that the Game had saved his life, beyond questions” (Stepping 314).

15The Scouting Game recalls that the Merryweather boys’ camp took place at the time when the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) organization was founded in 1910. Like its British counterpart, this military-style boys’ movement was “intended to improve fitness and discipline and raise morale” (Reynolds 58). Following Britain’s Boy Scout program that “drew imagery and rituals from empire for its program for the training of boys” (Connell 49), the American Scouting movement was established to promote, as the BSA founders pronounced, “the ability of boys to do things for themselves and others, to train them in Scoutcraft, and to teach them patriotism, courage, self-reliance, and kindred values” (qtd. in Townley 7), which was very much in sync with Merryweather’s ideals of boys’ education. While today, the BSA has encountered its share of bullying and sexual abuse accusations leading to a youth protection program (“Youth Protection”), Richards’s description follows the late-nineteenth-century trend in America of fostering organizations that work with middle-class boys in the hope of curing them of the disease of feminized upbringing. Church organizations such as the Knights of King Arthur, outdoor groups like the Sons of Daniel Boone and The Woodcraft Indians, the YMCA, and the “ultimate organization” of the Boy Scouts of America were crucial in sustaining particularly manly ideals of ruggedness and companionship: “These organizations meant to introduce coddled boys to the wilderness, to competition, to hardy play and strenuous virtue. In these boys’ groups as at boarding schools, men were intervening to provide ‘boyish’ experiences so that boys would not lose touch with the sources of manhood” (Rotundo 258).

16This seems like an apt description of the Merryweather summer camp scenario. Many examples in Richards’s chapter follow such an agenda, culminating in the chapter’s closing where Richards once more glorifies the camp experience with the vision of all Merryweather boys having turned into worthy men “who come back from year to year, as prefects, masters, tutors—or as fathers!” (Stepping 322). She describes a typical finale of a camp period, which is accompanied by a set of songs, first the marching song “John Brown’s Body,” the lyrics of which are not included in the text, followed by a song of herself:

Now comes the last song; this in my own slender pipe, the strong, fresh young voices answering in chorus. Here are the closing verses:
Oh! Brothers dear, the world is wide,
and storm and shade must fall;
From wind and wave we may not save
The dearest of you all.

But yet—but yet—ah, ne’er forget,
In tempest or in night,
That clear and true still shines for you
The Merryweather Light! (Stepping 322)

18In this context, it is important to point out that Richards lists her four daughters as part of what she calls the camp’s “Faculty,” and although she delegates all females “indoors,” dividing and sharing “the household tasks” (Stepping 307), she later also refers to herself and her daughters as leaders in their own right, for example when Richards is reading with the boys, leaning “erect against a tree” (312). Likewise, “Alice was chief musician, editor of the Camp Log, bow-paddler, baseball scorer—what else? Rosalind—the shorter list would be of the things she did not do” (307). Alice organized the final campfire with a round of singing and herself in the center of the circle leading off, “erect, ardent” (321). And it is Alice, Julia Ward Howe’s granddaughter, who initiates the collective singing of “John Brown’s Body.” Richards’s repeated calling up the erect position of female musical performers is surely no accidental phallic allusion, but rather a couched acknowledgment that the camp is a masculinized institution that “displays a vehement gender regime designed to produce a combative, dominating masculinity” (Connell 215–216), to which even females have to succumb when they take over active roles of leadership.

20Early on in her autobiography and referring to the practice of her songs, Richards self-reflectively and quite revealingly comments on the mismatching affects they cause. While singing and reading to her children, she selected from the repertoire she knew from her own mother and what she considered “the gayest and most cheerful songs I knew” (Stepping 224). Her children, however, seem to have had quite unwanted reactions: “[T]hese songs became, to the younger of the Two at least, utterances of doom. She could not bear them, and what is more, she has never to this day heard them willingly. To her they still are ‘those terrible songs,’ and even if I still could sing, I should not be permitted to sing them” (Stepping 224–225). With Richards’s astounding honesty in this admission in mind, one can easily continue to question the asserted general gayness and cheerfulness of her songs, including the aforementioned “Antonio.”

3. Boys to Men

21A group of former Merryweather boys got together and in 1939 published the songbook The Hottentot and Other Ditties, a collection of Richards’s songs, supposedly without her knowledge. The dedication, written by “The Conspirators,” states that there are two groups of such conspirators, the first of which are “the nursery listeners of three generations ago,” while the second group consists of “the boys of a certain Summer Camp” (Hottentot 3), making an outspoken bow to their former “First Mate” of Merryweather.

23However, this ‘crack’ in the heteronormative order is veiled by the cheery musicality of the lyrics as well as by the joyful simplicity of the tune. Another musical rendition of the song, this one with Richards’s original composition, highlights the performative possibilities of the song’s gender play (“3 Compositions”). This interpretation of the song is—perhaps tongue-in-cheek—sung by a single girl, accompanied by a female chamber quartet, thus stressing Gordon Ginzburg’s point that we should read the poem not from Antonio’s, but from Lucy’s perspective.

A Spanish Ballad
A gentleman in fair Madrid,
He loved a lovely maid, he did,
Of lovely maids the pearl and pink,
Oh, tink-a-tink-a-tink-a-tink.

He followed her both near and far,
Performing on his light guitar,
And often at her feet he sank,
Oh, tank-a-tank-a-tank-a-tank.

But she remained both grim and grave.
‘I wish,’ she said, ‘you would behave.’
And so he went and was a monk,
Oh, tonk-a-tonk-a-tonk-a-tonk. (Hottentot 26)

25Both songs refrain from offering other than solitary paths of sexuality for the male protagonists. They also do not follow the early twentieth-century pattern of children’s literature targeted at boys promoting unproblematic, appropriate models of masculinity and femininity according to which no ambivalent sexual models should be offered, and the only possible outcome of romance was to follow a heterosexual path. But contrary to the overt insistence on the heteronormative ideal, the deliberate omissions and silences in such literature could just as well “indicate that masculine sexuality was in fact not regarded as the straightforward issue it appears” (Reynolds 61). This is an instance where Richards’s autobiographical writing and her poetic license are disparaged. Whereas her account of boys’ camp life in her autobiography might be called straight-washed in its assertion of a heteropatriarchal regime (including masculinized activities of females), poems such as “Antonio” can be read as contrary commentary offering glimpses of gendered ambivalence and even “a feminist critique of marriage, which is incompatible with the attitude inferred from Richards’s autobiographies” (Gordon Ginzburg, “Nursery” 45). While I have pointed out some cracks regarding Richards’s safeguarding of the idealized marriage image in her autobiography, I argue that she goes much further in songs like “Antonio,” especially when it comes to readers’ and singers’ perception of Lucy’s resistance to marriage and Antonio’s ambivalent prospects of bachelorhood. Sullivan suggests that “children develop a sense of what is or is not acceptable at an early age, and when they see another child acting in an unacceptable way, they often have a rhyme or song of judgment for the occasion” (154). The singing boy in the video described above might see Antonio as being wrongly acted upon by Lucy, and his expressive gestures while refusing to sing along to the—for him—hurtful lyrics may be his way of signaling judgment in turn.

26If that be the case, Richards’s witty humor has failed its intended emotional effect, at least for this boy. As Sullivan suggests, “sexual humor—whether a parody or a song or rhyme in its own right—is a way of dealing with a topic of considerable anxiety in such a way that the anxiety is largely removed. Laughter, after all, is a way of dealing with fear and nervousness as well as a way of expressing delight” (158). This boy might gain considerably less humorous delight from these poems than girls do, and the reason why—at least according to Richards’s account that we might mistrust—the Merryweather boys had so much fun singing songs might be not only because “[s]ummer camps certainly are the most benign of the total institutions for children and adolescents” (Mechling, “Folkore” 284), but because they are male-only institutions—female instructors notwithstanding—fostering certain boyish qualities and discounting others that conflict with mixed-gender behavior. Not counting possible crushes that boys might harbor for their female leaders, there were no girls in sight that a boy like Antonio might wish to pursue and thus heterosexual anxieties stay at bay.

27But what about other fears or longings beyond the regime of straightness? Are we, then, surprised that Richards’s songs and recollections hardly offer hints as to hidden desires that these boys might wish to pursue, instead? If the magic of a boys’ camp experience lies in their male bonding, what about the possibility that “certainly the homoeroticism present in a scene like a Boy Scout camp must pose … paradoxical feelings in the boys” (Mechling, “Magic” 46)? Richards’s camp scenario shows only joyful male interactions and no anxieties arising from the strict heteropatriarchal code of conduct, even though, as Connell stresses, “[t]he hierarchy of masculinities is itself a source of violence, since force is used in defining and maintaining the hierarchy …. The fear of being at the bottom of the hierarchy, being defined as a poofter or a sissy, is a familiar way of training boys and men to participate in combat and violent sports” (217). The boys of the camp, being trained to perform their masculine duties in society and war, seem oblivious to any such fears; there are no hints in Richards’s account of any threats—or pleasures, for that matter—arising from the potential of homoeroticism. They seem to master the rites of adolescence without stumbling, emerging as successful men and fathers in their own right.

28In contrast, the boy from Richards’s song, Antonio, stumbles, is prevented and thus unable to properly perform a hegemonic masculinity. But the song does not go as far as offering a sociable solution that would allow Antonio to fully succeed in an alternative to the regime of straightness. Ultimately, his ambivalent, unsociable fate as bachelor can be viewed as “a strategic concession,” as Alan Richardson suggests for such Victorian child heroes who do not so much subvert a masculine role within patriarchy but rather soften it to “allay the younger boy reader’s resistance in order to coax him into accepting the phallic heritage he may prove otherwise unwilling to assume” (15). If one agrees with Kilcup and Sorby’s suggestion that Richards’s poems allow for a “social energy” (9), by offering themselves as “play zones,” then we can unearth “open spaces for playfulness, curiosity, and cultural resistance” (3). And one such site of resistance would be playing with sexual ambiguity.

29Richards’s texts—both her autobiography, and especially her songs—reflect models for understanding boyhood in the early twentieth century and invite contemporary readers to grant them a certain fluidity of gender roles. Given the increasingly loud call for masculinizing culture and therefore toughening up boys and men around 1900, Richards’s boys’ camp serves as an affirmative example—although with some ‘cracks’—of this call. Poems such as “Antonio,” however, open up spaces for speculation about the role of not (wholly) normative males within this cultural climate of remasculinization. Therefore, Richards opens the door to let the reader imagine an otherness of the heteronorm, only to assuage him lest this might be too much to admit. But the door is left ajar, nevertheless, the crack remains.