Frog Went A-Courtin'
by Feodor Rojankovsky
Summary
John Langstaff gathered and retold the old folk ballad about a frog who dresses up, mounts his horse, and rides off to court Miss Mouse, a courtship that proceeds through a small parade of guests, a fiddle playing bumblebee, a moth, a flea, arriving for what becomes a full wedding feast, before the song's traditional twist ending arrives and breaks the celebration in one sudden turn. Feodor Rojankovsky illustrated the ballad's whole cast of animal guests dressed in old fashioned finery, waistcoats, bonnets, tiny spectacles, rendered in full color and packed with the kind of small character filled detail that rewards a slow look on every page rather than a quick turn through.
The book preserves a ballad families had been singing to children for generations before Langstaff wrote it down in this form, gathering variant verses from different regional versions of the song rather than inventing new ones, and it works best sung rather than simply read, following whatever tune a family already knows for it or one of the recorded versions available since. Rojankovsky's crowded, lively compositions give even very young children plenty to look at during the many verses before the story's turn, and the sudden ending tends to surprise first time listeners in a way that makes them want the song sung again immediately, which is really the whole point of a courting ballad built for repetition in the first place.
Rojankovsky, a Russian émigré who went on to illustrate more than a hundred books over his American career, including dozens of Little Golden Books, brought a European fairy tale illustrator's eye for costume and character to material that had circulated in America as oral folk song for far longer than it had existed on any printed page.
Historical Context & Significance
Frog Went A-Courtin' won the 1956 Caldecott Medal for a book Harcourt, Brace published in 1955. That year's runners up were Marie Hall Ets's Play With Me and Taro Yashima's Crow Boy.
Rojankovsky had trained at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture before war, revolution and the 1922 Rapallo Treaty made returning home impossible, working first in Poland and then in France, where he illustrated Daniel Boone in 1931 and spent the 1930s on the Père Castor series of French children's books before emigrating to the United States in 1941. Langstaff built a long career as a concert baritone and early music revivalist, later founding the Christmas Revels tradition of community folk performance, and Frog Went A-Courtin' sits at the start of that same lifelong project of taking traditional song out of the concert hall and putting it directly into children's hands, one of twenty five books he eventually wrote.