Song and Dance Man
by Stephen Gammell
Summary
Three grandchildren follow their grandfather up to the attic, where he digs out an old bowler hat, a gold tipped cane, and a pair of tap shoes and turns the dusty space into a stage for a moment, telling jokes, tapping out a soft shoe routine, and singing snatches of songs from his years working the vaudeville circuit long before television or his grandchildren existed. The performance is small and improvised, an old man in an attic rather than a real theater, but Karen Ackerman's text and Stephen Gammell's pictures both treat it as the real thing, a genuine return, however brief, to a stage the grandfather has not stood on in decades.
Gammell works in loose, energetic colored pencil, full of motion and sparkle that mirrors the grandfather's sudden burst of performance, his lines looser and brighter during the dancing than in the quieter opening pages of the family simply climbing the attic stairs. The attic itself, a cramped, ordinary space cluttered with boxes and old furniture, becomes the whole stage for the grandfather's act, and Gammell never pretends it is anything grander than that, which is part of what makes the performance feel earned rather than dressed up for the children watching it.
Read aloud, the book is warm and short enough for one easy sitting, well suited to four to eight year olds, and it works especially well shared across generations, a grandparent and grandchild reading together about exactly that relationship. Karen Ackerman's text stays close to the grandchildren's own point of view throughout, so a young listener experiences the grandfather's vaudeville routine the way the children in the story do, as a surprising, slightly mysterious performance from someone they mostly know as simply old, rather than as a history lesson about a vanished entertainment form explained from the outside.
Historical Context & Significance
Song and Dance Man won the 1989 Caldecott Medal. The four Honor Books that year were Allen Say's The Boy of the Three Year Nap, David Wiesner's Free Fall, James Marshall's Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and Jerry Pinkney's Mirandy and Brother Wind.
Reviewers were warm toward the book on release; The New York Times Book Review called it "charming, lighthearted and entertaining." It honors American vaudeville, the variety stage tradition of singers, dancers, and comedians that had largely disappeared from American entertainment by the middle of the twentieth century, decades before either the book's child readers or, within the story, the grandchildren listening to their grandfather's memories. The gap between the grandfather's remembered youth and the grandchildren's own present day gives the book a double audience, a bedtime story for the children on the page and a small act of remembering for the adult reading it aloud to them.