Hap Palmer

A Biography by Mary Miche

When Hap Palmer started teaching, he would often play the guitar and sing folk songs with the children. It was a struggle to get the students to stay in their chairs and sing because they kept wanting to get up and move. So after a few exhausting sessions, he said to himself, why not work with this energy rather than against it? This motivated him to write songs which tapped the natural desire of young children to move and be actively involved. Hap also found that active participation was an effective way to reinforce the school curriculum, so he wrote many songs which involved children in activities such as moving and naming body parts, identifying directions as well as learning colors, numbers, and into creating music for audio and video cassettes that children and parents could enjoy in the letters of the alphabet. After twenty years of writing songs for use in classrooms and day care centers, he expanded home setting.

When he was nine years old, he told his mother that he wanted to play the drums. She said the drums were too noisy and bought him a clarinet. This was in the 50's, when rock and roll was becoming popular, so after a few years, he also took up the saxophone, which has a similar mouthpiece to clarinet. In junior high and high school, he played in the orchestra, the marching band, and the dance band. The summer before he went to college, his older sister Penny went to summer school in Mexico. She came back with a guitar. Hap got really excited about this instrument because he could sing a melody and provide harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment at the same time. During the 60's, he started singing folk songs and leading sing-alongs as part of his job with the Hollywood YMCA. He was also a member of the Chapman College pep band, where he played sax and clarinet. Because of all these different musical experiences, Hap was dabbling in a lot of different musical styles from folk music to Dixieland and jazz.

After he graduated from college and went into teaching special education, he was also working part time as a musician. Since there were a million guitar players, and not much call for clarinet and saxophone, he took up the electric bass. For several years he played with a group that performed in night clubs and restaurants on the weekends. When he was in his forties, he took up the flute just for his own personal pleasure but the guitar remains the instrument he plays most, because it is so easy to bring into the classroom and accompany himself as he writes and sings songs.

While teaching, he discovered he got more satisfaction writing for children, than being limited to writing salable commercial songs for adults, mostly limited to songs about relationships. With children's music, the possibilities are endless. He's written songs about everything from a hippopotamus to a roller coaster and is still fascinated with the breadth of topics about which he can sing.