These parents, she discovered, didn't sing for their children. Neither did most of the parents she knew.

And while Tallman didn't have children of her own and didn't know anything about babies - "I hardly know how to hold them" she says - she did know how to sing. "It was just instinct," she says.

In addition to instinct, Tallman had two other things. She had a trained soprano voice. And she had connections.

For six years, Tallman worked as a project manager for Interscope Records, helping coordinate recordings for Tracy Chapman, Nine Inch Nails, Tom Jones, and others. So when her friends asked her to make a recording of her lullabies, she decided to go all out with a studio recording. "I decided it would actually be easier to make a CD than just make a tape recording," she says.

The resulting CD, "Lullaby Themes for Sleepy Dreams," containing such classic bedtime ditties as "Hush Little Baby" "Golden Slumbers," and Brahms' "Lullaby," was picked up by a baby products Web site, where it sold thousands of copies. Ultimately Tallman pressed 40,000 of the CDs - but that was just the beginning.

As the proprietor of Rock Me Baby Records, Tallman has now released four CDs of child-friendly material - ranging from nursery tunes and game songs to lullabies from around the world.

Her latest CD, "Children's Songs, A Collection of Childhood Favorites," released in July, contains such childhood evergreens as "Bingo," "The Alphabet Song," and "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," the paean to hobo joys that was recently heard on the best-selling "O Brother Where Art Thou?" soundtrack. "I changed the words, so instead of cigarettes it's just about candy," she says.

Meanwhile, the budgets and the productions have gotten more elaborate - from the simple piano, guitar, and voice of the $2,000 first recording, to a whole studio-full of instruments, background vocals, and even pots and pans in the latest $10,000 effort.

"We got really creative," says Tallman, who lives in New Mexico. "We wanted to have something where the kids could just grab a spoon and play along."

Most of the songs on Tallman's albums have been childhood staples for decades, if not centuries, passed down from one generation to the next.

Until now, Tallman fears.

These days, such homespun fare is getting clobbered from two sides. On the one hand, there's "Barney," "Sesame Street," and the whole range of commercialized kids' music - some of it good, but almost all of it experienced passively by kids in front of a TV set.

At the other extreme, there are those "Mozart effect" parents who inflict symphonies and string quartets on their toddlers in the belief - now widely discredited - that children exposed to a steady diet of classical music will by a process of sympathetic magic end up as child prodigies. The phenomenon brought in its wake hundreds of Mozart and Brahms kiddie CDs. "Yeah, brilliant idea," Tallman says. "Someone got rich."

Her own claims for her CDs are more modest. Music won't turn children into little geniuses, she says. But it might make childhood just a little happier.

"Did you ever feel that music makes things right in the world?" she says. "For me, music has been so important. I just want to bring that to other people's lives."

Very young children, she feels, are especially susceptible to the soothing effects of live music.

"The singing voice is more powerful, more calming, than the speaking voice, especially if it's something that babies have never heard before," she says. "Maybe it's the repetition of a simple melody, and the beautiful sound that comes out that's different [than a speaking voice]. Or maybe it's the breathing. The breath in the voice has a different quality that's really beautiful."

Tallman's CDs, needless to say, don't qualify as live music. But they can serve as a springboard for it - and in fact, Tallman encourages this in every possible way.

"The interaction is very important," Tallman says. "That's why I have lyrics inside the CDs. It's fun to see the parents singing with the kids. And maybe that gives them the confidence to sing along, or to grab anything and start making noise. It does promote creativity."

Meanwhile, Tallman is doing well by doing good. The TV show "Joan of Arcadia" recently used her "Itsy Bitsy Spider" on an episode. And she's hearing from lots of parents who are relying on her CDs to keep their kids happy. Or at least quiet.

"I had parents tell me that they left the CD on the plane, and they had to have it Fed-Ex'd to them, because the kids sleep to it every night."

Copyright (c) 2004 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved.

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