Sing! Sing a Song!

This is a topic very dear to my heart. For years it seems I have been collecting material on the importance of song in our lives- not deliberately, just accidentally, by the by, like a magpie picks up shiny bits here and there, and before the magpie realizes it, the hollow in the tree is too full, and tis' time for housekeeping.

People used to sing. They didn't have to be exceptionally talented or gifted. They just sang. They sang while working, while playing with the children, they got together and sang together just for fun. People sang. They made their own music independent of any external sources.

I come from a singing tradtion. We sang in my childhood home, and so I sang to my children and with my children. When my eldest was just a wee little thing, still in diapers, not yet 2, we used to sing together while we scrubbed the kitchen floor. We sang this silly song to the tune of Jacob's Ladder,
"We are scrubbing mommy's floor
We are scrubbing mommy's floor.
We are scrubbing mommy's floor~
We are scrubbing, scrubbing, for the Lord.
Every tile gets brighter, brighter.
Every tile gets bright and clean
We are scrubbing mommy's floor,
We are scrubbing, scrubbing for the Lord.

This is the first thing that started me on my little journey of collecting the links in this chain of thought that resulted in this blogpost (and perhaps others to come):
A little note in a children's music catalogue which said basically that people don't sing anymore, and we should all try to do more singing without the crutch of tapes and musical instruments.
This astonished me. I didn't know that people didn't sing anymore since my own family sang all the time.
From there I started looking for references to singing in my books, in people's lives, in comments friends made, and I realized that the authors of that catalog were right. Too many people don't sing anymore.

This is the latest link in my chain:

"An important part of the mass meetings was the freedom songs. In a sense the freedom songs are the soul of the movement. They are more than just incantations of clever phrases designed to invigorate a campaign; they are as old as the history of the Negro in America. They are adaptations of the songs the slaves sang- the sorrow songs, the shouts for joy, the battle hymns and the anthems of our movement. I have heard people talk of their beat and rhythm, but we in the movement are as inspired by their words. "Woke Up This Morning With My Mind STayed on Freedom" is a sentence that needs no music to make its point. We sing the freedom songs today for the same reason the slaves sang them, because we too are in bondage and the songs add hope to our determination that "We shall overcome, Black and white together, We shall overcome someday."

I have stood in a meeting with hundreds of youngsters and joined in while they sang "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round." It is not just a song; it is a resolve. A few minutes later, I have seen those same youngsters refuse to turn around from the onrush of a police dog, refuse to turn around before a pugnacious Bull Connor in command of men armed with power hoses. These songs bind us together, give us courage together, help us march together."

This is from Martin Luther King , Jr's book Why We Can't Wait.

Singing together is about more than making joyful noises, although that is special, too. Singing together binds us together, whether we are are courageous protestors or a small family. I'll be writing more about this in later posts. Meanwhile, don't wait.
Sing!

Update: Two follow up posts on this topic here and here.