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community weblog
Love Is Everywhere
Children's singer Raffi on his 50-year career, screen time and Ms. Rachel - "I'm the guy who sings about the banana and eats it too. That's me. A troubadour with a peel!" (previously; Love Is Everywhere ;)
posted by kliuless on Oct 25, 2026 at 6:54 AM
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Raffi is wonderful.
Hear me out: due to some sycronicity in the car this summer I realized I really want an album full of Raffi covers of the Red Hot Chili Peppers songs, which would obviously be called the Red Hot Raffi Peppers.
posted by ropeladder at 7:41 AM
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A different outcome than if he started a punk band
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:53 AM
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What no Canada tag? Raffi is perhaps one of a few performers all Canadians can agree is a national treasure.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:20 AM
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So I've consistently left on the table all these offers, including one from the producers of "Shrek" who wanted to make a "Baby Beluga" film. We asked the question, "Will this movie be directly advertised through fast food joints?" "Oh yes," they said. So we said, "No thank you. We don't do that."
It seems that successful children's entertainers often have a much stronger moral compass than average.
posted by TedW at 8:58 AM
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Raffi was my first concert as a child. Many decades later he was also my daughter's first concert. His songs are lovely, and his heart is true. I put him on a level right beside treasures like Mister Rogers.
posted by Inkslinger at 9:02 AM
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My sister-in-law has a great story about running into Raffi about a decade ago during her bachelorette party somewhere on Salt Spring Island, BC. I was so jealous!
posted by btfreek at 9:43 AM
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Look up the release date of Bananaphone. Note it down.
Go onto US Tubi (use a VPN if you gotta) and watch Garfield and Friends, Season 2, Episode 26, skip to 15:44, and watch the 'quickie' segment. Note what happens in it. Also note the the... well, notes played by the phone keypad presses during the segment.
Look up the release date of Garfield and Friends, Season 2, Episode 26.
The lesson to be taken from this is clear: inspiration might come from anywhere...
posted by BiggerJ at 12:48 AM
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Raffi is old enough and adored enough that it important to add the not-dead tag when mentioning his name. Please. You don't know what that split second did to me.
When the pandemic hit my son was almost 3 and I posted on facebook that my great fear was that the pandemic would last so long that he would not be able to get me into a Raffi concert. Thankfully, last year I took him into a Raffi concert. We sat in the front row. He liked it...but honestly though I love Raffi I never played that much for him, so he wasn't full-on Beatles fan in 1964 like me. He was also 8 which is kind of too old for Raffi at that point, insofar as Raffi is for kids. But whatever, the important thing is this; I got to go to a Raffi concert. I cried. He sang a verse of Baby Beluga that was for all the parents in the room who came because THEY were Raffi fans as children. I ugly cried.
Here he is singing Baby Beluga with the new Grown-Up Beluga verse, accompanied by Yo-Yo Ma.
I think I've told this story before, but I once was having a conversation with someone much older than myself who grew up pre-Raffi and he mentioned something about an email conversation he was having with David Amram. And I was like "Wait...David Amram is a real guy? Seriously...like the peanut butter sandwich guy?" and the person I was talking to was very confused and claimed that David Amram is a composer or something. And then I explained that no...David Amram is the peanut butter sandwich guy and that I thought Raffi had just made up the name to rhyme. Well apparently, he told David Amram about our conversation and it turned out that A) David Amram (the composer) was indeed friends with Raffi and was THE David Amram from the song and B) He said that the friends of his gen-x kids were super-in-awe of their friend's dad being the guy from the Raffi song and it was, in their eyes, much greater than any of his own musical accomplishments.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:58 AM
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This week on Canadian Entertainers with Political Siblings, we present: Raffi, whose sister Ann was information and privacy commissioner in Ontario for many years. ...
(tune in next week to hear about Leslie Nielsen and his brother Erik, deputy prime minister of Canada.)
posted by scruss at 5:28 PM
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