Holden changes the wording of the song from “If a body meet a body coming through the rye…” to “If a body catch a body coming through the rye…” What characteristics does Holden find desirable in the child singing?

Before meeting  Sally Hayes, Holden goes to find a record called “Little Shirley Beans” for Phoebe by Estelle Fletcher. As he walks through the city, he hears a poor kid playing with his parents, singing the song .  Kid “swell” because he goes his own way. The parents are on the sidewalk, but the kid marches along the street, next to the curb, singing, “If a body catch a body coming through the rye.” He has a pretty voice and is just singing “for the hell of it.” Cars zoom by, some apparently having to screech their brakes to miss the boy, but he is not perturbed. For Holden, this is pure, innocent, and real, a living example of art for art’s sake although he does not state it that way. The performance is the better because neither the kid nor Holden, his only audience, takes it very seriously. The event brightens Holden’s day. The scene is even more significant because it foreshadows Salinger’s revelation of the central metaphor of the novel, the source of the novel’s title, in Chapter 22.