Dale Cockrell: Music in "Little House on the Prairie"

Mon., Aug. 4

I had never read any of the “Little House on the Prarie” books before coming to this Institute. As a kid, I’d seen snippets of the TV show as I flipped the station to Scooby-Doo or the Incredible Hulk. The aesthetic of “Little House” does exactly appeal to a child of the 80s.

But I loved the book and should probably go ahead and read the others in the series. Wilder captures what life might have been like during that period with vivid descriptions of everything from the Indians to the little covered carriage which carried her family to far-away states only to be taken apart in a matter of seconds. The story captures the strict parental discipline absent today, the sibling rivalry between Wilder and her sister, and the childhood love of pets—Jack, definitely my favorite character!

The interesting thing to me about “Little House on the Prairie” is that Laura Ingrams-Wilder was 65 when she published the book in 1932. Wilder would have been about 2 years old in the 1860s when the events in the story take place. And though a lot of the details come from family lore, a lot of it is also based on her own memories of that period.

There was a tender/awkward moment during Cockrell’s lecture when he looked like he was about to tear up. The book was really about the demise of the Osage Indians, he said, whose population dwindled from 2 million in its heyday to 2,000 (today?). In Wilder’s book, the Indians are portrayed as villains who come in to steal the family corn and at one point are about to walk out with their furs—they end up leaving it behind. But Cockrell pointed out that during the 1860s the Osage Indians were literally starving to death and probably stole food from settlers to survive.

The book was a huge critical success saving Harper Collins Publishers. It stayed on the top ten children’s book of all time for many years before the Harry Potter series came to dominate.

Cockrell’s work with the book has centered around digging up the backgrounds to the 127 songs mentioned in the series. He is working on recording all of the songs. CD’s to accompany the books can be purchased at http://www.pasfiddle.com/