Gonna Sing My Head Off!

This superbly edited songbook is akin to an invigorating musical tour of American history and American regions. Its flavorsome contents include sea chanteysstet like the 100-year-old ballad ``The Sloop John B. ,'' the traditional square-dance tune ``Old Joe Clark,'' and Lee Haysstet and Pete Seeger's ``If I Had a Hammer.'' Concise introductions explain each song's origins and influence, and sometimes offer lore--the train song ``City of New Orleans'' was written by a railroad rider campaigning for Edmund Muskie, and commemorates a route followed by none other than Casey Jones. Krull provides uncomplicated arrangements for both piano and guitar, and she notes that she has chosen the keys ``easiest for the average person to sing and play in.'' Garns's illustrations, which seem to have been executed in crayon, have a dreamy quality not suggested by the zingy songs. His figures tend to be isolated and/or frozen into their poses (the art for ``Oh, Susanna!'' for example, eschews the mirthful banjo-strumming of the first verse in order to portray the slumbering man's vision of Susanna in verse No. 2), or figures are absent altogether; these static compositions lose the music. All ages. (Oct.)