[Cover photo credit to Dyana Van Campen]
Award-winning children’s musican Sukey Molloy is kicking off the festive season with her first holiday album for families. Snow Is Falling! Songs for Christmas, Hanukkah & Kwanzaa with Sukey Molloy is out now.
The new album features traditional holiday and seasonal songs, in the spirit of the Mike and Peggy Seeger albums for children of past generations. A felt art video trailer for the album is out now.
Joining Molloy as producer and arranger of Snow Is Falling! is Grammy-winner Larry Alexander (The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie), who has served in this capacity for all six of Molloy’s albums.
Some of the songs on the album include “Jingle Bells,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Up On The Housetop,” “Oh Chanukah,” “Kwanzaa Is Here,” “Rudolph the Red Nosed Raindeer,” “I Have a Little Dreidel,” “Frosty the Snowman,” and many more, including two seldom-heard Woody Guthrie songs, “Happy Joyous Hanuka” and “Hanuka Dance.”
The album’s title track features new holiday lyrics from Molloy set to the melody of the familiar round, “Frère Jacques.”
Molloy explains:
I originally created this song so that everyone in the audience could toss white scarves in the air to make ‘snow’ while singing. I love singing rounds and love the feeling this brings of winter. ‘Snow Is Falling’ seemed like the perfect way to wrap up our holiday package.
Trained as a professional modern dancer in New York City, Sukey Molloy performed and toured as a member of the Solomon’s Company Dance and went on to study developmental movement and Kidnastics with former Olympian, Garland O’Quinn, Ph.D., and infant development with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.
Her work in “movement skill development through guided play” led Sukey to design and teach music and movement programs for nursery schools, after-school programs, and elementary schools, and, in 2005, to launch her own Nyack, NY-based PlayMove&Sing programs of classes and teacher training workshops.
By 2006, Sukey had formed her own Circle Song Band (later known as Sukey Molloy & Friends), with which she performed the “Sukey Molloy (Circle Song) Show,” presenting programs with musical storytelling, stuffed felt characters, and interactive songs.
