Three themes are considered in this paper: musical childhoods, music education for religious conversion, and music in schools in the UK between 1970 and 2004. These themes are then related to three concerns regarding historical research in music education: research should be responsive to the contexts in which the teaching and learning of music take place; due attention should be paid to the actual teaching and learning of music; music education should be viewed as an essentially broad area of activity. Examples are assembled from a variety of times and cultures, from the medieval period to the present day, from the United Kingdom to South America and the Labrador coast of Canada. A subsidiary theme concerns some of the ways in which historians of education carry out their work with particular reference to archival research. Conclusions are presented which focus upon the inclusive definition of music education as comprising all deliberate efforts to pass music from one generation to another.