Grade school choir sings Beatles

Associated Press/Douglas Healey

Horses congregated for food at Lee's Riding Stable in Litchfield, Conn. Litchfield offers an idyllic environment, providing a peaceful place to spend a day strolling among history and nature.By Scott Bauer ~ The Associated Press

When self-professed guitar-strumming hippie Hans Fenger became a grade-school music teacher in rural Canada in the mid-'70s, he wanted to try something different.

Instead of having the children sing traditional fare like "Jimmy Crack Corn" or "I've Been Working on the Railroad," he had them do David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Wings' "Band on the Run." He also had them perform songs by the Beatles, Beach Boys and Bay City Rollers, among others.

"For me to go in there and start singing these generic children's songs I always thought was so goofy," said the 53-year-old Fenger, now a music teacher at a Vancouver grade school. "I went in and just taught music that I kind of knew and the kids kind of liked."

Thanks to Irwin Chusid, a New York area disc jockey with an ear for the unusual, the strange but captivating tunes sung by Fenger's students recently were released on compact disc.

What Chusid describes as genius may best be heard in the children's singing of "Space Oddity," accompanied by banging drums and a steel guitar played with a glass bottleneck.

"'Space Oddity' was just a sort of freak out," Fenger recalled. "It kind of blew the older teachers' minds."

There are quieter, but no less bizarre, moments as well -- like 11-year-old Tina van de Weteringe Buys' solo rendition of "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft."

"We were just singing what we were humming to in the back seat of our parents' cars," said van de Weteringe Buys, now 35 and living in Vancouver.

Fenger relied on the 60 or so students -- aged 9-12 in fourth through seventh grades -- in the Langley, British Columbia, community to help pick the music they wanted to learn.

"They liked singing heavy songs. The heavier the better," Fenger said. "That was part of the strangeness of the whole thing."

Using a two-track tape recorder, Fenger captured nine songs on tape in 1976 and with the help of a friend pressed about 300 albums for the children, their classmates, teachers and families. Another album was recorded in 1977.

The songs were never intended to be heard beyond the area served by the schools until Chusid played the song on the ai..

"Everyone was having the same reaction to it," Chusid said.He led the effort to have the music released on CD.