There are maybe thirty of us, mostly women, a few men. In our 70s and 80s. We only need the lyrics--which have been printed out and placed in three-ring binders, one to a chair. We already know the melodies. We grew up with them. Some are from the late 1800's (The Man on the Flying Trapeze) with everything on up through the '60s ... and a few beyond that. Don't Fence Me In. Cole Porter. A bit of Gershwin. Pennies From Heaven. Paul Simon. Cat Stevens. Leaving on a Jet Plane.
Every Tuesday for six weeks, from 1:30 to 2:30, we gather in the music room of a local church and fill the hour with song. Susan, our director and accompanist, knows most of the people and all of the songs ... and tucks right into them twiddling across the piano keys, sometimes even standing up to play. She makes it all rousing, good fun. Sometimes she gives us a little background. For instance, she said Shine Little Glow-Worm, Glimmer, Glimmer had been taken from a German operetta and re-lyricized in the '50s.
I haven't sung for years though I've been a singer most of my life--in a college madrigal quartet, two New York City amateur choruses, community choruses in the towns where I've lived, a small, early music group. The great works from Handel to Honegger with some Monteverdi and Villa-Lobos tossed in. I was devoted to it. I even took singing lessons for a time. But then ... I stopped. I no longer wanted to commit to winter night driving to attend rehearsal. Too dicey ... or too potentially dicey. Or I'd come home but not get to sleep ... just lie there with the music replaying in my head. So a six-week spring afternoon singalong seemed just the thing.
I enjoy reviving the old familiars but have also surprised myself by sometimes finding myself in tears ... when singing All Through the Night because it is so unimaginably beautiful ... and This Land is Your Land because it rushed me back to the '60s when I was out adventuring and life was grand. And because I suddenly felt very privileged to have been a part of that era. To have known the music culture of that day--the Weavers, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Peter Paul and Mary. During Peace Corps training, we'd sit evenings and sing their songs. As we did on the banks of the Mississippi after one all-day hike through the Southern Illinois woods.
After our singalong group sang Getting to Know You (you remember, from The King and I), one man, well into his 80s who'd spent time on Broadway, informed us that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote it for Mary Martin in South Pacific. But South Pacific's first night had gone on forever, he said, and didn't get out until well after midnight. Something had to be cut. Then when the stage production of The King and I came out a couple of years later, Gertrude Lawrence (who played Anna) found herself with fewer audience-arousing songs than the performer who played Lady Thiang, the king's head wife. That had to change, she said. So, Rodgers and Hammerstein trimmed Lady Thiang's songs and handed Gertrude Getting to Know You, writing an entire new scene just to fit it.
We have just one session to go. Heck, if there are any re-plays, I'll sign up.
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