Category Archives: Liberal religion

The folk process

We’ve been singing a great song in my Labor Heritage Chorus, called “May the Work that I Have Done.” The lyrics that we use go something like this:

May the work that I have done speak for me,
May the work that I have done speak for me,
If I fall short of my goal, someone else will take a hold,
May the work that I have done speak for me.

It’s easy to make up more verses: May the marches I’ve been on speak for me; May the songs that I have sung; etc.

But where did this song come from? Mudcat.org, the indispensable folk music Web site, has a short thread on this song, tracing it back to a 1969 recording by the gospel duo The Consolers; the songwriting credit goes to Sullivan Pugh, one half of that duo. New lyrics (basically what I’ve included above) are attributed to San Franciscan John Fromer.

Now I’d love to be able to share this song with Sunday school volunteers here at church. But the easiest way to share such a song in a Unitarian Universalist church is with sheet music. Unfortunately, the tune we’ve been singing in the Labor Heritage Chorus is somewhat similar to the Consoler’s recorded version, but it has been run through the folk process long enough that it now sounds significantly different — the only sheet music I’ve been able to find uses the Consoler’s version of the tune and words. This probably means I’ll have to transcribe yet another song. Nobody ever told me in seminary that I’d feel the need to transcribe songs as part of being a minister.

We play games and make quilt squares

Series of entries in my teaching diary about an experimental Sunday school class. First entry.

During the first fifteen minutes of the worship service this morning before we went off to Sunday school, the children got to hear the church choir sing a delightful arrangement of the folk song “Somos el Barco,” originally written by singer-songwriter Lorre Wyatt. Melissa, one of the teachers in our class, went up to light the chalice with her son Zach, who is in our Sunday school class, and her daughter who is in the high school youth group that meets at the same time as our class. Then it was time for the children to go off to Sunday school, while we all sang “This Little Light of Mine” together. This was a spirited rendition of “This Little Light,” with our music director, Henry, at the piano doing a rocking gospel-style accompaniment, which brought forth full-voiced singing from the choir and congregation. I noticed that a number of the children knew “This Little Light” and were singing it as we gathered together at the back of the church, and some of us kept singing during the last verse as we slipped out one of the back doors to head off to our classroom. Each of these elements of this opening time in the worship service has been planned with Amy, our parish minister: at my request, she chose ten hymns that are kid-friendly and that we will try to teach in Sunday school this fall; she is getting families with children to light the chalice each week so kids can see their peers participating in the worship service; and she is including different elements of the worship service during the first fifteen minutes so that the children can get a sense of the different things that happen during worship.

When we had gathered in our classroom, we had nine children: Dorit, Heather, Zach, Sara, Perry, Monty, Lily, Kerry, and Sid (note that I never use real names for children). Kerry and Sid were new this week; Kerry is friends with Lily, has come to church before, and is friends with Lily; Sid’s family is completely new to the church, and is in (I think) 3rd grade. There were four of us adults today: Susie, Melissa, me, and Sid’s mom who decided to us on Sid’s first Sunday.

“Let’s get the carpet squares in a circle,” I said. That took a while, but the children are beginning to realize that I expect them to help set up the classroom, and more children helped out than did last week. As we were settling in to the circle, I reviewed some of the silly lessons in speaking with a New England accent from previous classes: “What’s this called?” [patting the floor] “The flo-ah!” “And what city did I live in before I came here?” “Nu Befit!” [New Bedford] And so on. It turned out that Sid and his mom had recently moved to California from Massachusetts, so they were amused by my New England accent lessons. While these lessons in speaking with a New England accent are mostly silly fun, I have been thinking that many children are unaware that there are regional accents in the United States; they are fairly aware that people who grew up in another country, or speaking a language other than English, might have an accent, but they are not nearly so aware that people talk differently just because they live in a different part of the country. Continue reading →

Our conversation ranges widely, from John Murray, to suicide, to free speech

Series of entries in my teaching diary about an experimental Sunday school class. First entry.

As is our new custom, all of us — children and adults — began together in the worship service in the Main Hall at 11:00. Amy, our parish minister, taught us a song called “Thula.” It’s a Zulu song, in 3-part harmony, and “thula” means hush — it’s a lullaby, but it’s also a great song for helping people become peaceful.

We gathered in a bigger room this week, and it was a good thing we did because we had twelve children this week instead of nine. Pete and Ari were not here this week, but Rawley and Chad (brother and sister) and Perry and Monty (brothers), and Lily joined us today (for privacy, I use pseudonyms for the children). All four of use teachers were present — Lee, Susie, Melissa, and me — as well as two parent visitors — Lucy from last week and Amanda.

It took us a while to settle down. We did not have enough space for the children to sit in a circle, so some of the adults and children moved tables around. I asked two children, Lily and Oliver, to put carpet squares down in a circle for our opening circle. They started to do so, got distracted by their friends, and then we realized we were going to have to move the circle again, by which time everyone was helping. While this was going on, Susie was taking attendance.

Most of the children got in the circle, but we were still settling in, and Susie was still trying to take attendance. I talked a little bit about regional accents — I had to explain what an accent was, because some of the children didn’t know — and then I had the children learn how to say some words in a generic eastern Massachusetts accent. “There’s a red thing that you eat, and it has claws, what would you call it?” I said. Rawley got it: “A lobster!” “Exactly,” I said, except that where I come from we’d say ‘lobsteh.’ ” The children and adults all said, “Lobsteh.” “And then where I come from we like to eat clams. Did any of you ever have clams?” Several people nodded. “We like to steam clams, and we call them ‘steamahs.’ And we like to dip our steamahs in buttah — you’d say ‘butter’.” All the children said “steamahs” and “buttah,” and most of them were smiling or even laughing by now. All this had nothing to do with my lesson plan, but it served to cover over the chaos of rearranging the room, and it also served as an icebreaker activity.

At last we were settled in our opening circle. “Who are the sixth graders here today?” I asked “One of you can light the chalice.” Monty, Sara, and Chad held up their hands. “Sara, you lit it last week, so Monty, why don’t you do it this week, and Chad, we’ll have you do it next week.” Chad lit the chalice, and in another digression from my lesson plan, I talked to the children about how hair burns really easily, so those of us with long hair have to keep our hair away from fires. Continue reading →

“On the first Sunday the adventure is launched” [1]

At 11:00 a.m. this morning, children and teenagers and adults from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto (UUCPA) gathered together in the Main Hall for the first fifteen minutes of worship service. Some of the teenagers didn’t quite make it into the Main Hall; they had cooked dinner for the homeless people who stay overnight in the church each night in September, and then they had stayed overnight at one family’s house. But when the children from our Sunday school group had gone into the Main Hall, some of the teenagers were there, and lots of adults of all different ages. Amy, the Parish Minister, had welcomed everyone, and invited everyone to stand up and greet each other. Then the pianist played Chopin’s Prelude no. 6 in B minor; from where I sat in the back of the Main Hall, I could see the children settle down and relax. A family with children lit the flaming chalice while Marianne, one of the worship associates, led the congregation in saying some words together. Amy read Eric Carle’s story The Mixed Up Chameleon, introducing it by saying that although the story is aimed at young children, older children are the ones who really understand the story. Then Amy led the congregation in singing the song “My Roots Go Down” while the children gathered to go off together to the newly-established 11:00 Sunday school class, called “Expanding Circles of Faith.”

By 11:15, nine children and five adults had gathered in Room 6 on the UUCPA campus. The children ranged in age from Dorit, who was 6 and in first grade, to Sara and Peter, both 11 and both in sixth grade; the other children were Oliver and Bill, both in second grade, Heather, Zach, and Andrew, all in fourth grade, and Ari who is in fifth grade. (These are not the children’s real names, of course.) The adults included Melissa, and Susie, and me, three members of the teaching team who will be teaching this group this year, and two parents who were visiting the class.

We sat around the low circular table in Room 6, and after attendance had been taken, it was time to light a flaming chalice. I asked Sara, as one of the oldest children in the class, to light the candle in the flaming chalice, while the rest of us said some words most of the children knew from other Sunday school classes at UUCPA: “We light this chalice, a symbol of Unitarian Universalism, the church of the open minds, the helping hands, and the loving hearts.”

Usually I like to allow time in Sunday school classes for the children to talk about one good thing and one bad thing that had happened to them in the past week.  But things were a little bit awkward, since most of the children and adults did not really know each other, so instead we took the time to play a name game called “The Grocery Store Game.” First we moved the table out of the way. “Pick an item that you can buy in the grocery store,” I said, “the name of which begins with the same letter or the same sound as your name. So I’m Dan Dog food.” Everyone smiled at that, and we went around the circle as the children and adults chose grocery store names for themselves: Sara Saran Wrap, Zach Zucchini, Melissa Marshmallow, Dorit Doughnut, and so on. “Now one person stands in the middle of the circle with a pillow,” I said, demonstrating what I meant, “and one person, let’s say Oliver Olives, starts us off by saying ‘I like…’ and then someone’s grocery store name.” Oliver got it, and said, “I like Bill Berries.” I continued with my instructions: “At this point, I will try to tap Bill Berries with the pillow before he can name someone else.” Bill berries said hurriedly, “I like Ari Asparagus,” who in turn said, “I like Heather Hair Spray,” who didn’t respond before I tapped her with the pillow, so she went into the center of the circle. Continue reading →

UU children’s choir 2010

I just got the announcement for the 2010 Unitarian Universalist Children’s Choir. This is basically a five-day children’s choir camp which culminates in a performance at General Assembly. I have talked with parents of children who have participated in past UU Children’s choirs, and they say it’s a fabulous experience. Children whose birthdays fall between 28 June 1997 and 22 June 2000 are encouraged to apply. The last UU Children’s choir was in 2006, and the next one won’t be for another 3 years, so this is literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Applications, including a recorded audition, are due October 20. More information at www.uucc2010.com.

Participatory singing

So how can we get congregations to sing better? I’m not a very good musician, but I’m a pretty good teacher, and if you think like a teacher the obvious thing to do is to teach your congregation how to sing. Once you have that big, broad goal, you can break it down into manageable chunks. Now I admit that I have never taught a congregation how to sing well enough that they spontaneously sing in harmony, but I have taught smaller groups how to do so, and there’s an obvious progression of steps to take:

(1) Learn a core group of songs/hymns so that everyone knows them well. You choose the core songs for their theological relevance, singability, and beauty. It helps if they are easy to memorize.

(2) Sing those songs repeatedly until most of the people in the group know them well.

(3) Teach simple harmony parts for the core songs. Singing the songs with minimal or no accompaniment helps everyone to really learn the songs and harmony without relying on the crutch of a piano or guitar.

(4) Sing the core songs with their harmony parts until most of the people in the group know them well — well enough that as soon as you start singing one of the core songs, the people who know the harmony parts spontaneously start singing in harmony.

I’ve outlined this as a neat and tidy progression of teaching tasks, but in real life it’s not that neat and tidy. You might start by teaching one song and immediately adding harmony parts; then gradually adding other songs, some with harmony and some without. The exact path you follow will always depend on the teacher’s abilities and the chemistry of the group being taught. But in every case, the goal is the same: to have the group learn a core group of songs with harmony parts.

Such a plan would not do away with choirs, soloists, and/or professional musicians — choirs and soloists can help support us ordinary singers, and sometimes we like to just sit and listen to really good musicians. I also think such a plan would help us damp down the fights over church music style — when you’re sitting and listening as a passive consumer of music you have every right to be picky about the style of music you are being forced to listen to, whereas when everyone’s singing together we are more likely to understand that all musics are created equal (as Peter Schiekele used to say).

What would this plan look like in the actual worship life of a congregation? Continue reading →

Singing in harmony

We had our teacher training here at the Palo Alto church this morning. There were 25 people present, and at one point, partly as an experiment, I taught the group a simple Zulu song, “Thula” (available in The Folk Choir Song Book). I am neither a trained choir director nor a particularly good musician. Our group today had some people who are good singers, but most of the group probably only sings at karaoke and campfires. Yet in five minutes, I had the whole group singing in three-part harmony. We sounded fabulous.

Some of us were talking about this after the training. We agreed that society at large trains us to understand ourselves as consumers of music product. We do not have the sense that participating in music is a normal part of human life. And even our churches have become places where the music is produced only by professionals (and trained amateurs), while the majority of us have become passive consumers of music. We don’t even have church karaoke, for Pete’s sake.

Mostly, I think — at least mostly in Unitarian Universalist congregations — no one takes the time to really teach congregations how to sing. We let the professionals do the music for us, or we let the trained amateurs sing for us, and we sing limply along on the hymns (hymns which are rarely in keys suitable for our untrained voices). Sometimes the music professionals do things like offering hymn sings before the worship service, which increases the volume a little bit but does not make the congregation sound fabulous. Sometimes the ministers choose hymns which are fun to sing, rather than choosing hymns where the words fit the theme of the sermon, but still the congregation doesn’t sound as fabulous as they could.

Singing harmony in a large group can cause beneficial physiological changes in people; it can induce transcendent experiences; it can cause little children to dance and sway in time to the music. Why do we settle for anything less than singing so we sound fabulous?

Read the follow-up post.

Sunday morning

The choir I just joined, the Labor Heritage Rockin’ Solidarity Choir, performed “A Musical Biography of Pete Seeger” at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco this morning. We were the main event in their worship service. After being introduced by their choir director, we filed up onto the stage at the front of their worship space, dressed in our black t-shirts and black pants. This “musical biography” combines narration and semi-staged dramatic vignettes, with songs which Seeger either wrote or made famous.

About ten minutes into our performance, the congregation applauded one of the songs. I was a little surprised; I could hear the bass section well and I knew we had not been at our best. But from where I stood I couldn’t hear the rest of the sections very well, I had no idea how the choir as a whole sounded. Then came the dramatic vignette where Seeger goes before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and when he is asked if he ever joined the Communist Party, he pleads the First Amendment, saying that he shouldn’t have to answer any questions relating to his freedom to associate. The congregation applauded for that, and I realized that they really liked what they were seeing and hearing.

I was a little surprised by this, because I kept hearing all the things the bass section did wrong — we fumbled some key entrances, we weren’t all singing in unison a few times, all the moments when we messed up. I was also all too aware of my own shortcomings as a singer — I don’t have the breath control I should, I’m not a confident enough singer that I can always stick to the written music when the singers around me are singing wrong notes, I sometimes lose my concentration. But the congregation didn’t care. They sang along with familiar songs like “Guantanmera,” and “If I Had a Hammer.” The soloists were very good; the speakers were moving; the message behind this musical biography was deeply moving; and, in spite our technical and musical faults, our section sang with feeling and power, and though I couldn’t really hear them I assume the rest of the choir did too.

The congregation gave us a standing ovation at the end of the worship service. That surprised the heck out of me, although that standing ovation wasn’t really for our choir as performers — that ovation was more for the power of Pete Seeger’s career as a singer and community activist, as captured by the script written by our music director, Pat Wynne. I shouldn’t have been surprised, of course. This kind of thing happens all the time in worship services and amateur musical performances in which an important message is delivered with genuine feeling. But when you’re standing at the far end of the bass section, and you can’t really hear, and all you can do is concentrate on singing the right notes when you’re supposed to, you may not be aware of what’s happening around you.