This season in our online classes for kids we’ll be traveling to the United States and Canada. For many of us, including yours truly, this will be a journey inward – to our home regions, our states, our cities and streets – literally, to our own back yards.

As I hope you’d expect from All Around This World, we’re going to blast through the notion that American music is only “one thing” and take a multilingual, multicultural approach. Every American music genre, especially the most “American” such as Jazz, hip hop and blues, stand on the shoulders of music from every part of the globe. This season we’re going to sing in Native American languages, Spanish, French,… We’ll note that Salsa is a Latin music that was born in the US, between Puerto Rico and New York, We’ll approach disco as a genre built on international funk. We’ll appreciate Conjunto and Hawaiin musics as being as American as country fiddlin’ and the Delta blues.

I’m so glad you’ve chosen to join me on this journey. Let’s go.

In class this week we sing “Wala WaHed,” a bounding love song by Egyptian superstar Hakim. “Wala WaHed” is a song in the genre of Shaabi, which is described as music of the Egyptian working class. The song in this video is not that one. It is shaabi, and oh so catchy, but otherwise…the video is nuts. Okay, I don’t speak Arabic, so I don’t understand, but still, even if I could undersetand the song’s lyrics…how could this video not still be nuts?

Yesterday we met “Walhav Re Nakhwa,” a song from Marharastra sung by the children of sailors on the Indian Ocean. Here is the All Around This World version, complete with rocking, rowing and a whole lot of wiggles.

This week in our online class we take a well-deserved breather between seasons. For the last three months we’ve been on an epic journey, learning about enough countries and cultures to make our heads spin. Next we’re going to start another three month voyage to do the same. So in this class we take a break from our deep-diving and sing songs drawn from many seasons.

This week, after singing hello in Egyptian, we go first to western India to sing “Walhav Re Nakhwa,” while we row a boat out onto the Indian ocea. Next we land in Southern Italy – Sicily, to be exact – where sing “Zumba Lariula,” a playful song, in an old Sicilian dialect, about about the machinations around a wedding. From Italy we go to to Egypt, as we become animals traipsing through the Sinai desert, (“Drink the Water”), bounce all the way to Scotland, where we sing “Chi Mi Na Morbheanna” a loving song about our homeland, and end, before singing goodbye in Nubian, we visit Egypt’s working class communities and sing the Shaabi love song, “Wala WaHed.” Non-stop singing, non-stop fun.