It was 1979, and if there was one thing that was great about being a third grader at Burton Elementary School is was all the singing. The tradition that continued until at least the 90s, by which time the old school had been torn down and replaced. When I was there, though, each of the two or three classrooms had a well-used piano, and several days a week the two classes would meet in one room or the other to sing our hearts out. We turned the desks sideways to form long rows and sat on top of them. Show tunes, patriotic songs, Christmas carols, songs our grandmothers had sung, songs that had been popular in the distant days of our teachers' youth. A decade later, YouTube suggests, the kids were still singing many of those same songs, but at the "new" Chautauqua Elementary.
Each kid had a special song or two. They'd jump up, go to the front and help lead/perform the song (usually song and dance). There were concerts, of course, several times a year, and once I remember taking it all on the road to perform at another school.
Third grade was also the year I really became a reader. I devoured chapter books, memorized poems, and composed stories of my own (which were terrible, I am sure). At some point that year I was tapped to go down the hall and tutor a first grader who was struggling to learn how to read. Craft projects and drawing were also a big deal at school, and that may be where my sister's passion for art first bloomed.
I had not yet begun to dread recess. But I remember the first clues that I might in how I felt when the tether ball went whizzing by my face and when a kid named Eric went out of his way to praise and encourage me as I kept missing balls on the foursquare court.
That was the year the P.E. teacher, Mrs. Adams, called my mom to come in for a conference. The topic: how my sister and I needed to improve our ball-handling skills. We had both been born without depth perception and were hopeless at games and sports. At the teacher's recommendation, Mom bought us a big, bouncy, red rubber ball to play with. But our driveway was gravel, the road in front of our house a rough pavement with no sidewalks, so there was no place to really bounce or roll a ball except the garage, where we used it to "bowl," knocking down rows of my dad's empty beer cans. His drinking would later become a problem, but this is before that really happened, or at least before I had eyes to see it. At any rate, music and the arts were at least as much a big deal as sports and games, so I had little sense of falling short as I leaned more toward one than the other.
All in all, a very happy year. It brought the dawning of self-awareness and self-possession but came before the rise of self-doubt, social awkwardness, and hopeless crushes on the boys all the other girls liked, too. By junior high my parents' marriage would be on the rocks and my sister and I would become rivals, alternately rejecting and seeking to please one another, bickering, getting on one another's nerves. At this point, though, we were mostly just fast friends.
I wonder what it would take to regain the playfulness of an eight-year-old, the joy of singing and dancing and playing and drawing and telling stories?
When People Used to Sing
Singing and singalongs were also a big part of life in many of the old-fashioned books I loved as a kid. Betsy and Tacy, for example, performed duets when they were children, and in high school and beyond would gather round the piano with friends and family to sing popular songs and songs well remembered from days gone by. I think, too, of Pa Ingalls pulling out his fiddle. The music we played at home, whether it came from my parents' record collection, the stereo, or my mom's little transistor radio, was often pretty singable; folk music had left its mark. So much of the contemporary music of that time was meant to be sung along with, perhaps unlike a lot of today's popular music.
And we sang a lot at camp. I went to Girl Scout camp, once to a Camp Fire Girls camp, and starting in sixth or seventh grade, five years of music camp. Eventually, as a church-going teenager, I helped with vacation Bible school and went on youth group retreats. But even in less-likely settings singing was part of camp. My sister brought home new songs from science camp. Do kids at camp still learn camp songs? Some of the same silly, singable ones? Or has that gone the way of gathering around the piano, except maybe at church camps?
Churches still sing, of course. But almost all church music, in the places I go, is worship music. You're singing directly to God. It's for him. Gone are the hymnals and harmonies. You rarely hear singing in parts. Even "rounds" and echo songs are gone. The music still stirs the emotions but you aren't supposed to be critical of it or focus on it. It's like it's all a means to an end, setting a stage for something more important than mere music. I get it, I guess, but somehow that no longer feels as much like singing to me. I miss the musicality.
"Praise and worship" music also has little room for storytelling. Complexity, artistry, and narrative are often replaced by emotion alone. But I'd rather come at worship a bit less directly at times. Churches where worship is so central that the singing is incidental feel kind of like schools only using music for educational purposes, like mnemonics. In those third-grade singalongs we sang "Fifty Nifty United States" with its list of states in alphabetical order. But not so we could pass a geography test. We also sang songs that were rich and beautiful, and others as joyful and playful but evidently purposeless as "The Beer Barrel Polka" and "Ragtime Cowboy Joe."
Why Not Bring Back Singing?
A while back a friend of mine wrote an article advocating for more singing in modern life... including singing at work. Why should children and churches, field hands and fisherman have all the songs? Anyone game for an office choir?
See also, from the archives, a reflection from my Young Life days, Songbook.
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