THE LEGENDARY CARTOONIST, WRITER, AND SONGWRITER MAKES HER WAY TO THE MAHAIWE FOR THE HOLIDAYS
By Laura Mars // Illustrations By Sandra Boynton Holiday 24
Sandra Boynton is a perfect example of the enormous talent tucked quietly away in the Berkshire and Litchfield hills. Anyone who has been a child (or parent) in the last 40 years has come across her board books and those bewildered cows, bright pigs, and sullen ducks. Kids and adults are in for a real treat this holiday season. The bestselling author, cartoonist, and songwriter has a new work, Cows and Holly, a picture book that includes a CD. She will try to explain this wild new Christmas album at a one-night-only event on Thursday, December 19, at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington.
Boynton will be on stage with WAMC’s Joe Donahue, and together they will pull back the curtain on how she, composer/collaborator Michael Ford, and dozens of superb singers and musicians—including Yo-Yo Ma, Lyle Lovett, and Patti LuPone—created Cows and Holly. The show will include music from the album, music videos that show the artists in the recording studio, and the story behind Boynton’s whimsical illustrations.
Whimsical, yes, but not strictly for children. “I think all of my work is for everyone,” she says during an interview from her farm in rural Connecticut. “I don’t make a delineation—children and adults can enjoy them together. And what’s better than that?”
Nothing comes to mind, come to think of it! Cows and Holly is designed not only for a wide range of ages, but for diverse musical tastes, including rock, a capella, Celtic jig, 50s Rat Pack crooner, doo-wop, and Broadway. The lyrics make you laugh out loud one minute and bring tears to your eyes the next. The album’s first song, “Sky Surfing,” includes these lines: “They say it’s eight tiny reindeer pulling one big sleigh. Seems highly unlikely, but I know it’s that way.” Another, “In December,” the first song Boynton wrote for the album, is a touching reminder about memories at this time of year. “So many bright Decembers, and where did they go? I know that I miss you. That’s all that I know.”
Music was a big part of Boynton’s home and school life. “My 1950s childhood coincided with the birth and explosion of rock and roll,” she says, “and, heck, it was Philadelphia! Not only with a legendary orchestra, but home to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.”
Mahaiwe Executive Director Janis Martinson recalls meeting Boynton when she showed up at the theater with her family for a classic movie. “We got to chatting and discovered we share some sensibilities, including theater training. When she told me about Cows and Holly, I thought it would be fun to premiere it here. The show combines the music and, in some cases, the animation that goes with the music or taken during the recordings, with her commentary of how it came together. The musical versatility shown in the album is astonishing.”
Equally astonishing is all that had to happen before “Cows and Holly: Sandra Boynton tries to explain her wild new Christmas album” makes it to the Mahaiwe. Just bringing together the extraordinary talent for the album was a year in the making. Some of the artists went to the studio that Boynton and Ford share in the Berkshire region, and others recorded elsewhere.
Lovett and Ma both recorded in Boston, for instance. “It actually was remarkable serendipity—it was almost exactly a year ago—that both of them happened to be in Boston at the same time,” says Boynton. “I brought up the musicians from Nashville who've worked with both of those artists, and we did three tracks in one day, at Q Division in Boston. Our Nashville drummer, Fred Eltringham, lived in Boston way back when and knew all the Q Division guys, but he was touring; he had to send us his part later. There’s nothing more fun than being in a recording studio with the artists.”
After the artists recorded, Ford and Boynton took all the files back home and edited them. Cows and Holly is their seventh album together.
The list of musicians and actors who have performed on their albums is legendary— from Samuel L. Jackson to Stanley Tucci, from Laura Linney to Neil Sedaka, from B.B. King to Steve Lawrence.
“Sandy is a force of nature,” says Lovett. “She’s been so successful and just so down to earth and so engaging. Working with her on this album gave me insight on how she works in a way that I didn't have from just reading her books. I became a fan years ago when I learned about her through Victor Kraus, who had worked on some of her music. Sandy does everything herself. She does the artwork and her clever words.
“Then, having kids and reading her books—my children could look at her books and pretend to read when they were two. They could recite every word to her books, and it just gave me that much more of an appreciation for Sandy and her work. Getting to know her and getting to work with her has just been a privilege.”
In addition to this incredible music being available on streaming platforms, all of Boynton’s books come with a CD. “That’s for a very good reason,” she explains. “CDs are coming back, especially for young children, because they offer a connection between the physical object, putting it in a player, pressing a button, and having music come out. That’s very different from thinking it’s in the air. It's a cool interface.”
This latest project brought Boynton back to the importance of recorded music. “That's where you encounter songs and fall in love with them,” she says. “All the Christmas music that I love, of course, comes from recorded music….One of the reasons that I've been determined to have as many music videos as possible and a great variety, including an animated one, is that it gives a visual to the recordings that we've made.”
Since 1974, Boynton has written and illustrated more than 75 children’s books, including Belly Button Book, Rhinoceros Tap, Philadelphia Chickens, and seven non-children’s books, including Chocolate: The Consuming Passion. And then there is, of course, the seven albums she has written and produced with Ford of “renegade” children’s music, as Boynton puts it. (She notes that she would only do children’s music as long as it’s actual music.)
A pivotal time for Boynton was during college, when she began creating unusual greeting cards because she couldn’t find any that she wanted to send, including what would become a bestseller, the “Hippo Birdie Two Ewes” birthday card. Since the mid-1970s, she’s designed between 4,000 and 6,000 greeting cards, almost all published by Recycled Paper Greetings, who estimates selling about a half-billion cards.
In 1978, Boynton married Jamie McEwan, a 1972 Olympian Bronze medalist in whitewater racing, and they moved to rural Connecticut, in large part for the community of paddlers. It was there that they raised four children.
“It’s a musical family,” she says. “Two of my kids have leads on this album, and a third is in a couple of the choral pieces. My oldest daughter, also a singer, is not on this album, but very much involved in the music I've done.”
“Cows and Holly: Sandra Boynton tries to explain her wild new Christmas album” comes to the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington on Thursday, December 19, at 7 p.m. mahaiwe.org
“A Sandra Boynton Christmas” will be at the American Mural Project in Winsted, Connecticut, on Saturday, December 7, at 7 p.m., showcasing Cows and Holly.
Next year, look for her iconic illustrations in a new cocktail book, Extremely Happy Holidays, written by Devin McEwan, her cocktail-inventing son.