Last month, the 14th edition of the Fids and Kamily Music Awards were announced. The annual survey of kids music writers, programmers, librarians, and other enthusiasts from across the country produced a list of their favorite kids music albums of the year (late 2018 through most of 2019) — a dozen ranked winners plus another 13 honorable mentions, a full 25 honorees. The winner in this year’s awards was the excellent don’t-call-it-a-holiday-album Winterland by The Okee Dokee Brothers, but you should go check out the entire list of recognized albums.
For what it’s worth, here’s my own personal ballot for this year’s F&K Awards. They’re not ranked because I gave them all equal weight in my ballot for this year’s awards. So, in alphabetical order by band:
Alegria - Sonia de los Santos
Finding Friends Far From Home - Oran Etkin
I’m from the Sun - Gustafer Yellowgold
Baby on the Subway - Camille Harris
Shake It and Break It - Randy Kaplan
Growing Up - Josh Lovelace
Buenos Diaz - The Lucky Band
Winterland - The Okee Dokee Brothers
A Cheerful Little Earful - Diana Panton
Backstroke Raptor - Story Pirates
This year’s process was bittersweet for me as F&K co-founder Bill Childs and I decided that this year’s awards would be the last. We wrote up our thoughts in this post, but the TL;DR is basically that kids and families aren’t listening to albums as much as they’re listening to streams these days, and there aren’t nearly as many people writing about albums, either. (It’s been awhile since this here website has tackled an album review, to provide a very pertinent example.) Bill and I have been clear that there will be no more Fids & Kamily Awards (though the website will live on for many years), but we are both hopeful that there will be something that replaces F&K in some way — we are both ready to participate in whatever might take its place.
I look at my list above and while I think it’s a solid list of ten excellent albums, I also see how I could’ve listed different albums who brought joy in other ways. And so I always enjoyed F&K because while it was based on people’s personal lists of favorites — personal lists that certainly were affected by each judge’s personal experience and tastes — by combining those lists, I thought it more closely arrived at something like a consensus. I don’t know if the idea of consensus is worth pursuing anymore, but for more than a decade, I hope the awards shined more light than there otherwise would be on albums popular and insufficiently noticed.
