Račke

This is a whole-body action song that turns a room of children into a flock of ducks. The instructions are all in the singing: make a beak with your fingers, “fly” by flapping your elbows, wiggle your bottom this way and that, and quack gaga-gaga. Then everyone is told to be a duck — “one, two, three” — and twirl; and, kindly, even the child who is sleepy, grumpy or a bit under the weather is invited to be a duck at least for the day.

Its cheer builds as it goes. Being a duck, the later verses insist, is really the best of lives — a drink in every puddle, never hungry, always full — and best of all when everyone is a duck together, splashing and laughing as one. That is the song’s warm little point: the fun is in doing it all as a group.

The song is not anonymous, and its tune is not Slovenian. Besedilo.si publishes it as Vesele račke with words by Tone Fornezzi — “Tof”, the Ljubljana journalist, editor and humorist born in 1934 — and music by Werner Thomas, the Swiss music teacher whose accordion tune (listed there as “Vogerltanz”) became the Ententanz, the Birdie Song and the Chicken Dance, with national versions from France to Sweden and over forty million records sold. The chord site Trzalica prints the same words with no author, which is how the song is usually met: as a playgroup standard nobody thinks to credit. The five verses here are the ones sung in playgroups; the full published text has several more, and its wording (for instance “Bod’mo račke zdaj kar vsi”) is followed in the panel above.