Songs and Sound

 Songs have been a big part of my life, and probably they are important in most people's lives. Somehow singing has been a component of human culture for thousands of years,  whether in an expression of togetherness, ritual, healing or religion.  I remember loving our music class in grade school. I had my favorite songs from the elementary songbooks and they still resonate with me. Then when I went to a Quaker boarding school for high school, singing became part of my evening life. We'd have a gathering each evening and part of it was singing folk songs with a guitar accompanying us. My college years had very little music, but once I got married, my husband and I bought a business that printed pocket-sized songbooks. The business was created by Lynn and Catherine Rohrbaugh in 1923, and we were lucky enough to know their grandson when the original owners were getting too old to continue. We moved all the equipment (huge printing press, folders, stitchers, cutters, light tables, darkroom accessories, thousands of songbooks of every sort) to our home valley in the mountains of North Carolina and operated the business from there for many years. It was called World Around Songs, and it specialized in creating custom songbooks for all kinds of organizations: churches, camps, schools, scouts, 4-H. As the owners of this long-lived business, we started having song circles for the community, going to recreation workshops to learn more, and discovering and typesetting new songs. It was an adventure!

Now in my older years, singing is not an everyday thing for me. In fact, my voice is not very good anymore. My years singing tenor in the West Branch Community Chorus are over. Yet each week here at Prairie Hill a large group of us gathers to play our ukeleles and sing. We even performed at an Iowa City festival last month. And a song circle that a friend and I started more than 15 years ago still meets once a month. Fortunately, you don't have to have a good voice to do these things! It is understood that singing is for everyone. We all just do our best. 

The Iowa Quakers have had a singing group, the Meadowlarks, for many years. They meet at least once a year to sing together all weekend long. Covid stopped it, but now it is happening again, and I decided to attend its fall event last weekend.  We met in Ames, Iowa, a university town, and I was able to ride with the same person (Jane) who helped start our local song circle so long ago. I was a little nervous about going to this singing gathering. I didn't know the other people well, and being an introvert, I had to screw up my courage. I put my "courage rock" in my pocket, took a deep breath, and hoped for a good experience.

What I didn't expect was how deeply singing together touched us all. After we got home again, emails started coming from everyone expressing how full their hearts were from the weekend. We had sung songs about joy, about tribulations, funny songs, happy songs, grieving songs, songs about peace, songs about birth and death, about work and play, about love lost and found. We were a collection of folks from all over the Midwest, with different experiences, different lives, and yet we were tapping into universal themes through all the songs. It indeed deeply touched our hearts and we left in a glow.

This experience has made me curious about the difference between talking and singing. Surely if our group gathered and just talked all weekend, the results  would have been much different! I suspect that singing comes from our right brain, whereas talking probably comes from our left brain. The way we chose songs on the weekend was to go around in the circle, each person choosing a song when it was their turn. And accompanying that choice was a chance to talk about why that song meant something to us. Hence, we heard lots of stories of people's lives. That was very special.

When I did some research on singing, the list of benefits was long. Singing makes us feel better, it improves the health of our lungs, it relieves stress and improves memory. It builds a sense of community if you sing with other people, or maybe even if you don't. It allows us to express ourselves in a special way. It can help with pain relief, build confidence, and in general singing improves our sense of well-being. I remember watching Captain Kangaroo when my daughters were young, and Mr. Greenjeans pointed out that we all sing, even if we don't know it. When we call over the fence to our neighbor., he said, that's singing. Singing is for everyone, not just for performers. It's our birthright. I remember that made a big impression on me. Singing is not just for people who are professionals, or for people who feel they are an acceptable voice. It's for everyone!  

And since we're not the only animals in the world, I started to wonder about how singing is expressed in our fellow creatures and how they too benefit. This is a huge area of research, and I won't go into it much in this post. But there are some surprising facts about sound in the early stages of the earth. Paleontologists and other scientists have done remarkable research about the absence of sound from living beings and then the slow evolution of their ability to vocalize. It is amazing to realize that for most of our planet's history, the only sounds were wind, rain and waves. Today I feel like celebrating the emergence of voices for us all. And of course we couldn't hear voices if we didn't have ears. We take so much for granted. But here we are in a rich diversity of sound on our planet, and I'm grateful!