Ask any parent, and they'll tell you: Kids love music in all its forms. They love to bang on drums, sing their ABCs, or watch Sesame Street jams online.
Bill Sherman certainly knows that to be true. As the musical director for Sesame Street, he's written over 3,000 songs for the show, including cuts like "What Am I," and "The Power Of Yet." He also works with actors visiting the show who might want to sing a little ditty, something that comes fairly naturally to him given that he helped former roommate Lin-Manuel Miranda (with whom he also formed Freestyle Love Supreme) to orchestrate and arrange In The Heights. (Sherman also produced the Hamilton record, just for good measure)
Working in tandem with Believe Entertainment Group and animation studio Global Mechanic, Sherman has created Jam Van, a new music-forward show for YouTube Kids that follows a friendly lamb and alligator as they journey across the country looking for musical adventures. They happen across a number of big-name artists along the way, including Miranda, Brandi Carlile and Sheryl Crow. On a stop in Virginia, the two zoological friends are joined by Old Crow Medicine Show's Ketch Secor and Jerry Pentecost, who offer up their own words of road-wise advice, as well as a catchy little ditty about the importance of asking for help.
YouTube Kids/ Jam Van
"The goal with Jan Van was to open it up to things that kids wouldn't necessarily hear [in their everyday lives], but that they really would enjoy," Sherman told Wide Open Country. "We naturally thought of Old Crow Medicine Show when we decided to set an episode in Virginia, because we knew Ketch is chrome there. Both Brian Hunt, the co-creator, and I are big fans of theirs. Their live shows are so energetic and their musicianship is incredible. And so we got in touch with them."
Secor, who has done work with PBS Kids and produced other children's material before, was immediately on board. "I think they came to me because I'm kind of a goof," says Secor. "They know that even as a professional musician playing to largely not children, I treat everybody in the audience kind of like a kindergartener. I'm Mr. Rogers with a fiddle, even though we sing a lot of songs that would be inappropriate on the playground."
Secor also likes that he was able to use his helping song to help teach kids a little about his home state. "When I was a kid, I knew a lot about states and state capitals and state geography, and I feel like in the 21st century, that's less taught," says Secor. "I don't know that it's that important to society that we all know that Akron is the fourth largest city in Ohio, but it brings me such joy to have command of geography. I learned that when I was a kid, so I'm always trying to keep that love affair alive in the next generation."
"When I was a kid, I was in love with place names," Secor continues. "I found that those words were more beautiful than any of the other words that were available to me in the lexicon. I love a word like Shenandoah because I don't speak the language that the word Shenandoah comes from. It's that unfamiliarity and that mystical feeling that a word provides a kid when they've never heard a word like that in the world. I'm in love with language. It's my consummate dance partner and I want to take language out on a really great date. That special relationship is something I've always longed to share with young people, because I want to figure out how young people can fall in love with language the way I did."
Sherman says that the OCMS frontman got the onus of the show pretty much immediately, producing a track that the creator says is both "uptempo fun" and serves as an introduction to bluegrass music for many kids. "One of my kids' friends is playing the violin in school and so for them to hear a fiddle, It's like a cool violin — not that the violin isn't very cool. In that format, though, the fiddle isn't something that they're used to hearing," says Sherman. "The next time kids hear a fiddle, they'll know it's a fiddle, too. They'll know what bluegrass music sounds like."
That's especially important to Sherman and the Jam Van team because it gives kids access to a whole new world of sounds. "These days, it's so much about 808 beats and things like that, because that's where most of pop music is," says Sherman. "I feel like even guitars are being lost these days, like when you'd just sit down next to the campfire and play guitar. Anytime that it becomes organic and people are actually playing instruments and you can hear the fret noises and stuff like that, that's important. That's somebody creating, and kids don't get to hear that enough."
"The instruments that I play are foundational instruments to American song," Secor says. "The guitar didn't really start happening in American popular music until 100 years or more after the fiddle and banjo did. The guitar isn't what the great songs of any century except the 20th were written on. Kids can play ukuleles and guitars of all shapes and sizes to their heart's content, but to not know these foundational instruments that really belong to everybody who is an American would be a disservice."
Secor thinks the history of the banjo is particularly important for kids these days to know, in part because, as he explains, "it's an instrument from Africa that was brought here in the minds of African travelers in bondage and then took hold in America and became a really important cultural tool of expression in in America's Black communities."
Secor says that, together, the fiddle and the banjo are representative of how different cultures and instruments have come together to create what we now call American music. "I remember my fourth grade unit was all about the melting pot, and it's really a great metaphor. I think gumbo might have been a better one, but in school, the melting pot is where all of the cultures of Europe and Asia and Africa and all of the world come together on the shores of America. But then at the end of the school's metaphor, all you get is a bowl of gruel. At the end of my musical metaphor, you get the songs that you know, you get joy and dance and ritual and power and rock and roll, and that all comes from the fiddle meeting the banjo."
Episodes of Jam Van are available to stream now on YouTube. Wide Open Country fans can check out an exclusive first look at (and listen to) Old Crow Medicine Show's song from the show below:
