From The Half-Red House

I just discovered that someone filmed and recorded our peace vigil in Peterborough NH a while back when we were about 100 strong, singing “Where have all the Flowers Gone?” it’s at This youtube page. I’m the one in the tie-dye shirt.

Singing together with friends is one of the great pleasures in life. I do it as often as I can. It’s fun to get a good harmony going, and if somebody brings a guitar or bass or dulcimer or keyboard, all the better, but a’cappella and unison is just fine with me.

One of the great tools for group singing is the book “Rise Up Singing” published by Sing Out Magazine (Sing Out Magazine Website), which contains thousands of songs that were being sung on front porches, campfires and on the fringes of folk festivals in the late 1980′s The book just has the words for most of the songs, with guitar chords. For rounds, the melody is notated, but mostly it’s assumed that someone in the group knows the melody and can teach it. The people who are most responsible for putting the book together are Peter and Annie Blood-Patterson. They’ve just moved from Philadelphia to Amherst Mass. to simplify and downsize their material lives.

Amherst is just about 60 miles from where I live, and if their presence stirs up as much singing activity as I suspect it will, we’ll likely be headed down there a lot more often. Last weekend, they hosted a British Quaker song leader John Sheldon, whose group “The Leaveners” (http://www.leaveners.org/) has just published a group singing book called “Sing in the Spirit”, focusing on songs relevant to the Quaker experience. There was a day-long workshop in which John, Peter and Annie taught a group of about 20 amateur singers several beautiful and complex songs from the book. Denise and I couldn’t make it to the workshop due to work and activism commitments, so we just went to the concert. I took home a copy of the book in hopes that we can get some of our local singers interested in learning a song or two. The songs are fully notated for singers and piano and include both religious and secular material ranging from unison chants to short oratorios. At one point John had the singers doing 16-part harmony. I was able to sing along with some of the African and Taize pieces. I was particularly impressed with a song attributed to the Greenham Common Women and another called “We’re Friends of the Earth”. After the formal concert, some of the singers performed the “Quaker Peace Testimony” A’Cappella in four-part harmony (they hadn’t included it in the concert because they hadn’t thougfht they knew it well enough); these were not professional singers and some of them could not read music at all, but the performance was incredibly beautiful.

Another type of group singing that is easy to participate in this part of the world is Sacred Harp shape-note singing (http://fasola.org/). It’s a traditional form of four-part harmony singing that originated in New England, and it’s completely participatory. It’s not just religious anymore: Village Harmony (http://www.villageharmony.org/ Villqge Harmony Myspace Page), a Vermont based singing movement for teenagers, sells a CD of modern secular songs in the shape-note tradition.

As a New England Quaker, I assure you that my theology does not match the theology expressed in the lyrics of the old hymns, but as a Wobbly, I love the old tunes and unlike Joe Hill, I don’t think I always have to rewrite the lyrics so they make sense before singing them. Some of them make a non-linear kind of sense anyway: the sense of the heart rather than the brain.

(I’m taking time out from schoolwork to write this so I feel a little guilty… so back to work! I’m listening to the Woven Wheat Whispers sampler “Her Voice Rang Through the Years” http://www.wovenwheatwhispers.co.uk/Folk_community/pc/viewCategories.asp?idCategory=16)
[Update: 2010-09: Woven Wheat Whispers sadly closed down a few years ago. If there is one of hteir free compilations that you'd like to hear, leave a comment here and I'll see if I can find it]