San Diego Folk Song Society News

2009

Sam Hinton
1917 - 2009

The San Diego Folk Song Society mourns the loss of our mentor Sam Hinton, a great folksinger, folklorist, diatonic harmonica player and artist. Our Sunday 2 pm, September 13, 2009 meeting will be dedicated to Sam. We will rise up singing to celebrate his life.

Sam wanted us to sing, so let’s sing out and share our thoughts about Sam.

(More about Sam Hinton)

(San Diego Union Story)

Our 9th New Years Eve Party

We will be holding our 9th annual New Years Eve party at the Old Time Music store, and Phil Boroff has graciously volunteered to be on the premises for the night. Sandy Stedinger, who is in charge of this event, is asking for help whether it is setting up chairs and tables and/or whatever it takes to make this a splended celebration. Please call her at (858) 279-8168. She would also like to know if you will be coming and asks that you call for reservations.

The San Diego Folk Song Society Concert Series
@ the Serra Mesa - Kearny Mesa Library

presents

TBA

Serra Mesa Library
Wednesday, -----------, 2009
6:00 pm to 8:00 pm

Serra Mesa-Kearny Mesa Library
9005 Aero Drive
(across from Montgomery Field)
San Diego, Ca 92123

Admission Price: Donations

Lots of Free Parking

Lie Down Singing

How a songbook saved my nighttimes.

By Emily Bazelon ~ for SLATE
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

http://www.slate.com/id/2207306/

Bedtime at our house has two rituals: stories and songs. (Yes, some children take nightly baths. Ours prefer dirt.) The books come first, the lights go out, and then Simon, who is 5, asks me or my husband, Paul, to sing. Three or four or five songs later, he asks us to sing some more.

We oblige. Going to sleep has never come easily to Simon. And so the lullaby medley at our house often turns into a miniconcert, in terms of quantity if not quality. This is all very sweet, I know—whenever I complain about the singing, people whose children have grown up tell me I'll miss it desperately someday. But at the moment, singing night after night gets tedious. I'm tired of my standard repertoire, and so is Simon. He has ruled out "Tender Shepherd" ("No more sheep"), "Hush Little Baby" ("I'm not a baby"), and "I Gave My Love a Cherry" ("Mommy stop singing that boring song!"). Also, almost anything in Hebrew and absolutely everything from Free To Be … You and Me. This is why, in our house, the songbook Rise Up Singing represents a nightly form of deliverance.

How many songs do most of us know by heart—beyond, that is, bits and snatches? How many of those songs wear well with kids? When folk singer Pete Seeger asked the first question of the men he was serving with in the Army in 1943, he was impressed with their responses. Now he thinks the list would be paltry. Rise Up Singing, which Seeger helped bring into being, is an answer to the ebbing away of shared lyric and melody. The book, which has sold more than 1 million copies, according to its creators, turns 20 this year. It is exactly as advertised on its blue, spiral-bound cover: "The Group Singing Songbook" with "Words, Chords, and Sources to 1,200 Songs."

The editors of this compendium are Peter Blood, a nurse who lives in Amherst, Mass., and his wife, Annie Patterson, a graphic designer who assigned the book's whimsical illustrations, which run toward smooching people and smiling animals. (On the cover, a girl with flowing tresses and a skirt of rivers and valleys helps birds—they can only be doves—take flight.) When Blood was a counselor in the 1970s at the Vermont summer camp Farm & Wilderness, his teenage campers wanted to sing Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. So Blood set them to work on a songbook. His first effort, called Winds of the People, was distributed informally. Then Blood and Patterson hooked up with Seeger and Sing Out!, the nonprofit chronicler of the folk movement, to round up the copyright permissions needed for official publication. Blood worked on the project full-time for two years "mostly haranguing publishers," he says. Seeger's manager helped him get their attention; his efforts are partly responsible for the hearty serving of Broadway songs that the book includes. The folk singers were easier to persuade. "They basically gave away their songs because they wanted them out there getting sung," Blood says. "They knew it was a words-only book, so it wouldn't compete with their recordings."

A canny choice. In my experience, there's a direct line between thumbing through Rise Up Singing and downloading songs from iTunes. The ballad "Pretty Peggy-O," which I grew up listening to Joan Baez croon ... there it is on Page 13, with angrier and more interesting lyrics than I remembered. The subversive lyrics to "This Land Is Your Land," which I'd forgotten, that Woody Guthrie wrote? Page 5, along with (sacrilege!) a Canadian chorus. All of this reveals, of course, that my affection for this songbook is overdetermined: I'm a child of the 1970s whose parents never graduated from folk to rock or anything else. More than I like to admit, the snatches of songs in my head come from a dozen albums that range, the opposite of widely, from Baez and Seeger (especially in his Weavers incarnation) to Simon and Garfunkel. Also lodged in my brain are pieces of a large number of equally embarrassing show tunes. And so for me, leafing through Rise Up Singing is like finishing a series of long-lost thoughts. Finally, I have in my grasp the second verse to "Day Is Done," and, look, there's a third one too, and now I won't bring down Simon's wrath by humming for bar after bar.

The book's other small wonders are its intricate organization—it's indexed by artist, title, subject, and culture—and its simplified guitar chords. For every song, Blood worked hard to find an arrangement that an amateur musician could handle, in a range that the amateur singers around him could handle. In fact, the main criteria for choosing songs for the book were whether they could be sung easily, whether Blood and Patterson liked a particular title, and whether it contributed to the book's lefty political slant. "There aren't a lot of Civil War songs," Blood says. I bring up "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," and he adds, "well, yeah, but that's a song about war not going so well."

Rise Up Singing doesn't pretend to be all-inclusive. There isn't a lot of blues or jazz or country, much less rock. Instead, the book has the kind of lock on one corner of Americana that fosters good-natured rebellion. According to Blood and Patterson, a group called Sit Down Singing went to the trouble to produce its own fake songbook—the perfect tribute from one ex-hippie to another.

In the campfire, singalong culture from which Blood comes, it's not how well you sing, it's that you're singing at all. My husband lives out this motto a few times a week. He's not so tuneful, but he sings a version of "Charlie on the MTA" that Simon can't get enough of. This song has its logical fallacies. Written to protest a fare increase on the Boston T, its protagonist must "ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston" because he doesn't have the fare to get off—never mind that his wife shows up every day at the Scollay Square station to hand him a sandwich "as the train comes rumblin' through." As Simon's older brother, Eli, likes to point out, she could have also handed over a nickel.

But this is not the point. The point is to give Simon the musical equivalent of comfort food. Parents weren't Blood's original target audience—"We originally thought about the book for schools or camps, or for the picket line," he says—but Blood and Patterson think that families are a sizeable share of the book's market. Sometimes, my kids sing along with me at night. And in my perfect universe, one of them learns how to play guitar.

America’s Music

Shared Song, Communal Memory

By BEN RATLIFF
New York Times
Published: February 10, 2008

(link to article)

EAST LANSING, Mich.     They meet on the first Monday of the month at the Universalist Unitarian Church here, not to worship but to sing. Just to sing. There are song leaders, some with a guitar or a banjo or an autoharp, but this isn’t a class or a choir; the singers, not the leaders, choose the tunes. Most hold copies of a spiral-bound songbook of folk music called “Rise Up Singing.” They perform songs like “Keep On the Sunny Side” and “This Land Is Your Land.” No one minds a voice gone off-key.

From Hawaii to Santa Cruz to the Philadelphia suburbs, in living rooms, churches and festival tents, similar gatherings — called community sings, or singalongs — draw together the average-voiced and bring old songs into common memory.

If there is a natural opposite to gold-plated pop irony and faceless file sharing — music as the American majority knows it in 2008 — this is it. These meetings are earnest, participant directed and person to person: a slow-going, folkish appreciation of American vernacular culture.

Much of this impulse descends from Pete Seeger, who has championed the cause of group-singing for more than 60 years. “No one can prove a damn thing,” Mr. Seeger said in a recent interview, “but I think that singing together gives people some kind of a holy feeling. And it can happen whether they’re atheists, or whoever. You feel like, ‘Gee, we’re all together.’ ”

Amateur group-singing has been around forever, of course, at bars, churches, schools, camps and stadiums. Community sings like the one in East Lansing are pitched halfway between the ritual of the campfire singalong and the self-conscious American folk-music movement of the 20th century.

In 1945 Mr. Seeger founded the People’s Song collective, which disseminated its own songbooks, thereby helping to popularize songs like “We Shall Overcome.” The folk revival of the late 1950s and the subsequent rise of folk festivals, some of which included song-circles as special events, furthered the idea that singing together could reseed a homegrown culture and empower the ordinary citizen to change society.

In 1973 Peter Blood, a Quaker, political organizer, teacher and folk musician in Philadelphia, put together a homemade songbook called “Winds of the People,” which quickly took off in the group-sing scene. “There was a demand for it in the circles we ran in, which were religious and summer-camp circles,” said his wife, Annie Patterson. In time Movement for a New Society and other nonreligious activist organizations adopted it for singalong events.

A decade later Mr. Blood and Ms. Patterson were envisioning a more ambitious book. They compiled and cleared the rights to 1,200 songs for “Rise Up Singing,” which was published in 1988. Mark Moss, editor of Sing Out! magazine, the pre-eminent journal of the folk movement, and also the publisher of the songbook, said it has sold about 800,000 copies, at $17.95 each.

It’s hard to gauge the size of the community-sing movement because by its essentially casual nature it resists documenting. There is no central organization, no comprehensive Web site of regular events. Groups of the kind that use “Rise Up Singing” are not registered with the American Choral Directors Association and have no academic or institutional affiliation.

But Mr. Blood, who now lives in Amherst, Mass., said that by a conservative estimate at least 100 regular singalongs around the country use the book, in cities including Santa Cruz, Calif.; both Portlands; Rochester; Chicago; Milwaukee; and Atlanta. Some of these are easy to find in an online search; some are publicized through regional folk-music society newsletters, church bulletins or strictly by word of mouth.

In East Lansing, Sally Potter, 47, a frank, energetic presence, leads the monthly sing. In early December the event drew about 80 people. Everyone gathered in the rear of the chapel, where the ceiling is low, “so you can get the chills more easily,” as Ms. Potter explained.

The chairs were arranged around an open square, the better to hear the blend of voices. The singers ranged from teenagers to the elderly; some had strong, penetrating voices, some murmured with wobbly pitch. They sang about 20 songs, including “Star of the County Down” (18th-century traditional Irish), “The M.T.A. Song” (a 1948 update of the early 20th-century American ballad “The Wreck of the Old 97”) and “The Rose” (1979, soft-rock radio).

The force of their voices grew during 90 minutes, with harmony occurring in unexpected places. In between numbers Ms. Potter waited for people to raise hands and politely make suggestions.

“Page 117, ‘Julian of Norwich’?” someone offered, referring to a selection from “Rise Up Singing.”

Great!” Ms. Potter responded quickly. “One of my favorite songs.”

“Is it ‘Nor-witch,’ ” another voice asked, “or ‘Nor-rich’?”

“I don’t know,” Ms. Potter said, shrugging, though she did. “It’s your song.”

Some sang the word one way, some the other. But Ms. Potter does have a few guidelines, including this: If someone picks a song, and it takes more than 45 seconds for everyone to learn it, let it go. There were no nonstarters on this particular Monday. In general, Ms. Potter said, she believes that people should get to sing what they came to sing.

The combined area of Lansing and East Lansing, which has a population of about 165,000 and is home to Michigan State University, has a perfect sense of scale for community projects: it’s not too small, not too big, and despite a perpetually slumped economy, it has a great deal of civic pride. It also has a famous guitar store, Elderly Instruments, a folk-music locus open since 1972; the Ten Pound Fiddle Coffeehouse, a folk-concert producer that has put on events for almost that long; and a popular local folk-music radio show on the NPR-affiliated WKAR.

Ms. Potter teaches high school history and economics in nearby Williamston. She has lived in Lansing for the last 23 years, during which time she has owned a restaurant, run the local farmers’ market and a used-sporting-goods store, and toured the Midwest in a folk trio, Second Opinion. Her interest in community sings goes back to the Hudson River Clearwater Festival in 1994, where Toshi Seeger, Pete’s wife, led a singalong group in a tent. Ms. Potter saw the same people returning day after day to sit cross-legged and sing, and she realized that participation was folk music’s core pleasure.

In 2003 she helped found the annual Mid Winter Singing Festival, a two-day event featuring community sings that tend to draw 400 to 500 people each night. This year’s festival, the sixth, was last weekend. There was a blizzard the first night, yet 340 people fought their way to the Hannah Community Center, a large building across the street from the Unitarian church.

In the evening events the singers sat in an auditorium and faced the stage, referring to set lists and lyric sheets. The song leaders were folk singers with longstanding local reputations: Claudia Schmidt, Joel Mabus and Frank Youngman.

“I’ve watched so many concerts, and I know what works,” Ms. Potter said. “When people are singing, you’re giving them the power, you’re giving them the music.”

Peter Blood agrees. “A lot of the experience of music in our culture is listening to someone else sing,” he said. “What I find exciting about community sings is that people feel they own the music.”

“Rise Up Singing” includes rudimentary chord notations but otherwise gives no indication how to sing a particular song; it is essentially used as a book of lyrics. It is not the only book used for participatory singalongs (shape-note singers tend toward “The Sacred Harp,” originally published in 1844), and some singalong groups bring their own songs. But it is the breakaway hit of its kind in recent decades.

Dan Zanes, the singer and popular children’s entertainer, used to sell “Rise Up Singing,” which he called “the ultimate songbook,” at his shows. “We don’t have that many songs rattling around in our heads anymore," he said, "so we need a guide of sorts.”

BookScan, which tracks sales back to 2000 through traditional bookstores, registers about 12,000 copies sold. But Mr. Moss said that most sales of the book have not come from bookstores. Song leaders order it by the boxful, directly from the publisher, or from the authors at quakersong.org.

Mr. Moss said that although Sing Out! magazine did not map or facilitate the movement, he believed that it is “much broader than ‘Rise Up Singing.’ ”

“Often I hear from people that they hate the book for use in those settings because people keep their noses in it,” he said.

Mr. Blood and Ms. Patterson organized the songs in it by theme, including “Ecology,” “Sea,” “Faith,” “Hard Times & Blues,” “Men” and “Women.” (While the “Women” section is full of feminist vigor, the “Men” section is introspective, with songs like “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” and “Let the Woman in You Come Through.”) The book includes traditional black American hymns; Cuban, Mexican, Irish and Hebrew songs; Stephen Foster; Jacques Brel; the Beatles; Phil Ochs; Bob Dylan; and Stevie Wonder. There are songs for specific holidays and songs from musicals.

With groovy spot-illustrations and hand-lettered calligraphy, “Rise Up Singing” has a 1970s liberal-progressive feel and an obvious bias toward group-singability, although Mr. Blood admitted that some of the songs were included more for lyrical content than for their significance or popularity. (The couple are at work on compiling a 1,200-song sequel that will include more selections from jazz, blues and rock.)

Perhaps the book’s greatest strength is its tacit proposal that there are many, many songs Americans should know by heart. In 1943, when he was in the Army, Mr. Seeger conducted an experiment on his fellow soldiers, asking them to write down the names of the songs whose words and tunes they really knew. In his own memory file he counted about 300, but he was impressed by the competition.

“I was surprised how many the average person knew back then,” he said. He supposed that the number of songs crossing lines of generation, class and sex would be much lower today, outside of “Over the Rainbow” and “Happy Birthday to You.”

At 88 Mr. Seeger is still a song leader, helping to run a singalong at the monthly meeting of a volunteer environmental organization near his home in Beacon, N.Y. “I like the sound of average voices more than trained voices,” he said. “Especially kids singing a little off pitch. They have a nice, rascally sound.”

After “Edelweiss,” and a beautiful run-through of “Song of Peace,” adapted from Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia,” the session at the Universalist Unitarian Church wrapped up. It was almost 9 p.m., but nobody seemed in a rush to get home. A scattering of regulars stayed, packing up the cider and cookies.

One of them was Marcus Cheatham, 51, who works in public health. Earlier in the evening he introduced one of his own songs, picking a mandolin to teach the melody. Mr. Cheatham started singing about six years ago, when he joined a church choir and later a “diversity choir” at work, performing on Martin Luther King’s Birthday and other holidays. The next step, he reasoned, was attending a community sing.

Asked if his knowledge of songs had grown since then, he corrected the question. “My enjoyment of songs has grown,” he said. “I’m not much of a musician at all. If you enjoy it, you can jump in and do it.”

“In our little community,” he added, “the economy is horrible, and people are scared and sad. But you go to something like this, and you think, ‘Wow, our community is resilient.’ ”

Margaret Kingsbury, 67, a nurse who is involved with peace groups, sounded a similar note. “I honestly believe that this is one of the ways to create peace,” she said. “You go away from here, and you’re uplifted.”

Ms. Potter isn’t surprised by such reactions. “I think it’s all a result of people needing to come together and find some power somewhere,” she said. “It’s a political need and a spiritual need. How many people left early tonight? It’s a Monday night. They’re tired. But people didn’t leave. That’s how you know.”

Give Me That Old-Time Singing

By DAVID VAN BIEMA
Time Magazine
Thursday, Jan. 17, 2008

Groups like the Lower East Side Sacred Harp Sing meet regularly at places like Googie's Lounge, above the Living Room in lower Manhattan

photo: Mark Peterson

One Saturday in January, a well-dressed man strolling Manhattan's recently gentrified Lower East Side unexpectedly found his way blocked by 35 people singing on the sidewalk. The lyrics were somber--"Then shall the dust return ... to God who gave it"--but the delivery was joyful. Asked what he thought was going on, he ventured, "I dunno. A funeral?"

Actually, it was a resurrection. The singers--housewives, ex-punkers, Evangelicals, atheists, Jews and Buddhists waiting for their usual venue above a local bar to open--were devotees of a Christian four-part choral style called Sacred Harp (the name refers to the human voice and a songbook published in 1844). Once America's dominant religious music, it was eclipsed after the Civil War. By 1960, say scholars, as few as 1,000 people clustered in the Deep South knew the style.

Yet today there are some 20,000 devotees across the country singing songs like Pisgah and Weeping Sinners. The website fasola.org lists a "singing" near you on almost any weekend. A documentary, Awake My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp, is airing on more than 120 public TV stations, and an album is in the works featuring alt-folk god Sufjan Stevens, alt-country hero Jim Lauderdale and (!) Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones.

This kind of thing has precedent. In 1997 the album The Buena Vista Social Club hit big with a sound defunct even in its native Cuba. In 2000 the old-timey twang of the Coen Brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou? grabbed a handful of Grammys. How do you revive an art form? A few hints:

Be weird--but worthy.

Nothing is weirder than Sacred Harp. Its favored subject matter--the pilgrim, the grave, Christ's blood--is stark; its style--severe fourths and otherworldly open fifths--has been obsolete for more than a century. Its notation, in which triangles, circles and squares indicate pitch, looks like cuneiform. Yet it exudes power and integrity. Five people sound like a choir; a dozen like a hundred. It is one of the most democratic choral forms: no audience, no permanent conductor--just people addressing one another and God.

Get Lomaxed.

Almost every revived American folk-music form was once recorded for the Library of Congress by musicologist Alan Lomax. He taped Sacred Harp in 1942 and '59. Unlike other finds such as Leadbelly, it failed to spark during the 1960s folk revival, but musicologists were infected. Now the form had imitable LPs and an academic beachhead.

Attract hip advocates.

In the early 1990s, punk rockers, says singer Tim Eriksen, "were looking for that kind of intensity in other music." Eriksen's band, Cordelia's Dad, and other postpunks seized Sacred Harp and exported it to trendsetting places from Northampton, Mass., to Portland, Ore.

Score a patriarchal blessing.

Bob Dylan made a pilgrimage to Woody Guthrie. Decades later, Southern Sacred Harp royalty generously embraced the wild-eyed newcomers--many of whom were nonbelievers--in what Awake My Soul co-director Matt Hinton calls "red-state, blue-state harmony."

Procure product placement.

T-Bone Burnett, who shaped the sound of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, did the same on Anthony Minghella's Civil War film Cold Mountain. Minghella hired Eriksen to sing a non-Harp song but was lured to Harp mecca Henagar, Ala. One result, Idumea, plays hauntingly over a battle scene--and won a new batch of fans. "I went in because of Jude Law but left with Sacred Harp," says New Yorker Anna Hendrick, 22.

After 45 minutes on the sidewalk, Hendrick and the other Manhattan harpers move inside and dig in. Singings can last two days. Today the group logs just three hours. "Join in a song in sweet accord," advised one of the afternoon's tunes. And so they did.

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