Hive Open Mic | Ili Ili: An Ilonggo Folk Song

As part of our homeschooling journey, I also teach folk music to my daughter. We have studied quite a few of the most common ones in our first grade. For this school year, we originally planned on foregoing Filipino folk music and just focus on studying famous composers. We were in the middle of studying Vivaldi's 4 Seasons when my daughter heard an Ilonggo song from one student in the higher grade levels during her recognition day.

Even I fell in love with the sweet melody of this Ilonggo folk song. My daughter said she either feels like she's having a relaxing walk along the seashore or she's being lulled to sleep by the soft mellow music. When we learned this song, this has become the lullaby she wants me to hum to her when she sleeps at night.

Learning Philippine folk songs helps her appreciate the culture of our country and even makes her fall in love with the languages she's learning. So far, we have learned a lot of folk songs from Luzon, now we're moving to Visayas and pretty soon we'll be studying folk songs from Mindanao. I have learned some of the folk songs from my grade school years before but there are quite a few that I am only learning just now - because of our homeschooling journey.

This song is basically telling a little girl or little kid to go to sleep while its mom is out buying bread. Now, when we buy our early morning pandesal, we use the term "bakal papay". I know it's just a very tiny little bit of practice in speaking other languages in the Philippines, but I'll take what I can. English is my daughter's first language and I'm right now transitioning her into learning Tagalog, I don't really mind slipping in a few other Philippine languages along the process.

We sang only one stanza of the song:

Ili ili, tulog anay
Wala diri imo nanay.
Kadto tienda bakal papay.
Ili-ili tulog anay.

Little one, Little one, sleep for now
Your mother is not here
Whe went outside to buy bread
Little one, little one, sleep for now.

This is the first time that we took a video of us performing a song. Most of the time it's just her when she's performing her Music performance tasks or for her exams. Every morning, before we start our lessons, we sing some songs, I'll play either the guitar or the ukulele for her while she sings the songs. You can tell in this video that this is us early in the morning. It really helps set the mood at the beginning of the day. This is how we homeschool. In our pj's. Haha!

I hope you enjoyed listening to the song as much as we enjoyed performing it. Till next time! Ciao!