Brittany Kelley
DRIPPING SPRINGS— Three Dripping Springs ISD students had the opportunity to be on a Grammy-submitted album this year.
According to mother Brittany White, her children were contacted by her cousin, Blake Robert Mankin, earlier this year to be on his children’s album, “What Rhymes with Orange.”
Mankin, who professionally goes by Mr B, has always been into music, specifically rapping. During his college years, he used this passion to create an app, titled Rap App, that would let users find rhymes with words. The app ultimately found an audience with teachers, who would use it to teach vocabulary with their students. From then, Mankin would guest speak in classrooms, eventually becoming a substitute teacher.
The app primarily provided word rhymes, rather than phrases, which was his original goal. So, years later, he went back to work.
“Groups of words became families to me, whereas some families were super well behaved in military style, like action, subtraction, retraction, extraction — those are perfect rhymes. Then, you have orange: orange, Florence, porridge, storage. Those are not quite as orderly,” explained Mankin, adding that the pronunciation creates the rhyme.
He wanted to share the ability to disprove the age-old myth that nothing rhymes with orange and settled on a picture book, adeptly titled, “What Rhymes With Orange?” This was not only because of Mankin’s experience with children and that he felt as though visual illustrations were the best way to share the rhymes, but also because over the year of working on his new app, he began to amorphize the words.
Orange was a girl, he said, who lives in a town, where everything rhymes. The character feels left out because no one believes that she has a rhyme, until she meets Silver, who also struggles finding her match. Ultimately, they form a friendship and discover that they do have rhymes.
Mankin’s familiarity with music and the book’s rhymes naturally lended itself to having an album accompany it. So, after creating the songs with a producer in California, he enlisted the help of his friend’s children in Arizona, but also Brittany’s three children in Dripping Springs.
Hayden White, 12, Baylor White, 10, and Beau White, 7, traveled to two separate studios in Austin with Mankin, where they not only wrote their own rhymes, but recorded several songs in a professional recording booth.
All three expressed that the experience was memorable.
Beau’s favorite part was recording the songs themselves and wearing the large headphones, while Baylor and Hayden preferred the engineering of putting the songs together and hearing the final product.
When Mankin visited the boys’ elementary school in September, Baylor shared that he was able to help his classmates create their own rhymes to the beat of the song, “Roll Call.” Beau even rapped his lines in front of the school pep rally, shared Brittany.
“[My friends] said I was famous,” beamed Beau.
Ultimately, each of the siblings left the experience feeling proud of themselves, which, according to Mankin, is the entire point.
Brittany even shared that the demeanor of her children changed when they were in the booth.
“I think the confidence for Baylor was huge,” said Brittany, who explained that her son had been in speech therapy for a few years. “For speech therapy, obviously getting up and rhyming, that’s hard for someone who has difficulty with it … Then, for Beau, it was the memorization. I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be hard for him to memorize his lines’ … [but] Beau gets up [and] his ability to memorize was insane, even so much so that there was a time where maybe his brother or sister forgot the line and he was like, ‘It’s this,’ and would help. It was so cool.”
For Hayden, it was a moment she could indulge in her passion for music and gain some confidence back after entering middle school, where sometimes she felt that she could relate to Orange.
“It was really fun to do. It made me feel like I could do lots of things. I felt proud and confident,” said Hayden. “At first, I was kind of nervous because I didn’t really know what it [would be] like, but when we walked in, the guy who ran the studio was making me feel good about myself and I thought, ‘I could do this.’”
Mankin submitted the album for the 69th annual Grammy Awards in the Best Children’s Music Album in August.
The “What Rhymes With Orange?” book is available on Amazon, while the album of the same name can be found on Spotify.
