SuperiorPics Celebrity Forums: INTRODUCTION TO MY SINGALONG BOOKLETS AND SING ALONGS

I'm sure the traditional, once fashionable, sing along, will surface again. I wrote the following summary of my Baha'i and non-Baha'i experience of sing alongs recently. I include this summary below. I have written this little piece for several internet sites in recent years and it has come to serve several purposes. I trust whoever comes upon this brief essay/posting/comment and reads a good part of it will find my words resonate with/in their life somewhat. If these few words(not few enough I hear them say!) don't resonate by, say, the end of the first paragraph, just stop reading and go somewhere else. Sing alongs may not be your cup of tea....I knew a man once who had 3 bags to make his cup of tea. Can you imagine!!
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The first booklets of music in my life, at least those I remember, go back to the early 50s. But the first booklet of music that I put together myself in order to run sing alongs was in the late 1960s at the end of the counter-culture period in North America—as some define that period of time. From about 1953 to 2005, a period of more than 50 years, from the age of about 9 to 60, I was involved in sing alongs in one form or another. In the last ten years, 1997 to 2007, though, sing alongs using booklets of songs I or others whom I knew-or did not know- became rarer and rarer--and eventually non-existent occasions.

In some ways it was fitting that the last three years of sing alongs in my life, 2002-2005, involved senior citizens. I thought at the time that William Faulkner's spirit may have been present in those sing alongs. I thought, as I led these old folks in song, that the spirit he had when he wrote his now famous book "As I Lay Dieing" may just be at the back of the leisure-social-room where we had our sing alongs. For all these people all lay, sat up or palely loitered about dieing slowly. Each month that I went back to this old folks home during the three years of these sing alongs someone else had died or was on the edge. The term ‘old folks home’ was what we used to call these places for the old and dieing when I was a kid.

For these last sing alongs in my life, at least to this point, I used published songbooks whose content was mainly for a generation born in the first quarter of the twentieth century the earliest years of Baha’i activity in Australia, the religion I have come to be associated with for more than 50 years. There was material in my one remaining sing along booklet for all age groups, but I never used it, well, only very rarely for the sing alongs. We used publishing company booklets with glossy covers for the sing alongs.

There is no material for sing alongs in my own booklets that originated from about 1977 to 2007. The group of humans born in the years after 1970 I have never tried to catered to. Their musical experience was, for the most part, not mine. My ears, it seemed, had moved on or out or over--or perhaps "back" is the most accurate word. I had moved back to jazz, classical, the top-40 from 1945 to 1975. I did not listen to the music of the generation that was 5 years old in 1975 and 37 this year. I did not listed to their music enough to be familiar with their songs, their lyrics and certainly not well enough to sing them in groups informally in the Baha’i community and/or in any other communities of which I was a part of as a teacher in primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions--or, indeed, any kind of institution or non-institution.

But the resources in my personally prepared, tenderly fostered, oft-repeated booklets of material that are here in my files, my collections—are kept tightly sealed now with a big rubber-band for a future time when and if sing alongs return to my life and to the groups I am involved with as I head into the middle years of late adulthood and, finally, old age. Old age begins, say some human development psychologists, at the age of 80. I've come to like that model since the 1990s sometime for it gives me, now in 2007, another 18 years before I'm actually, officially, or shall I say psychologically, old.

I have multiple copies of what I have come to call ‘secular song booklets’ for those not familiar with the Baha’i musical experience, for the students in classrooms where I used to teach and other groups with whom I used to sing. I have many editions, too, of song books in multiple copy form that I made for Baha’i groups, as I say, as far back as the late 1960s. I’m sure that these musical experiences called sing alongs will one day return and, when they do, I will be ready with my little bag of tricks. Who knows when and who knows where!

My wife and son became a little tired of hearing the same old stuff back in the 1980s and 1990s. For I need my song sheets; they have been my bible, my crutch, my only hope of ever generating a sing along: everyone with the same pages, the same words, the same everything---well--as sammie as one can get. As my wife and son moved around Australia with me, again and again they would hear--in halls, in homes, in a strange assortment of places-- the same old stuff. Can you blame them for their musical fatigue?

Singing in groups seemed to become passe, perhaps even slightly declasse, in the wider society in those same 1980s and 1990s. But I’m sure such singing will return before my demise, my passing from this mortal coil. Anyway, we shall see.

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married for 41 years, a teacher 35 and a Baha'i for 49