Singing that fills the living room or dining room or basement or kitchen is a tradition that's probably as old as group singing in itself. Phil, Beth, and Scott talk about their experience and tips for inviting people in to your home and to the songs themselves. Phil Hoose information. Beth and Scott Bierko information and a written piece by Phil and Faith Petric. These days, many people can’t imagine singing out loud without a Karaoke machine. It seems a shame, for nothing brings people together like making your own music in a group. To help revive and energize the great art of living room singing, we two veterans of it would like to offer a few suggestions. Faith’s Part. Phil: For about 35 years now I’ve been hosting group singing parties in my home. Often I co-host them with a group of folks who come up to Maine from Boston to spend the weekend. I don’t belong to an official Folk Club as Faith does, but I do try to schedule these events regularly. I host one sing in the winter, one in the summer and usually one in the autumn. We have a pretty big living room, enough to accommodate about 25 people. Heaven for me is a place within a circle of those folks, when everyone’s voice is raised together in song. Here’s how I organize singing parties, with a few tips and precautions: *About 2 months ahead of the date I send out an e-mail invitation to the usual suspects, inviting them to come and bring no more than one guest. Usually the party is on a weekend night. Our tradition is “Potluck at 5:30, singing at 7:00.” We sing until we give out, which is earlier than it used to be. I pass around a clipboard and ask everyone to update their contact numbers. *Sometimes, b ut not always, I propose—or solicit--a theme for the evening, pointing out that the theme can be broadly defined. For example, once we did “lust,” but it turned out that every song anyone could think of turned out to be lusty in one way or another (e.g., “Amazing Grace” is really about lust for salvation and a of courser man must have lust for the lure of the mines, etc). *Children are welcome. Often someone brings a movie or two for children who get tired of hearing their parents sing. What do you do if a child grabs one of your harmonicas and wails in the wrong key during a lovely ballad? Beam. *I ask everyone to bring five copies of the words and chords to their song. If you ask for 25 copies, you end up wading through an ocean of paper on the floor the next morning. Besides, if three or four people have to look on to same sheet, harmonies erupt. *Format: We go around in a circle, with each person getting to name and, if they like, lead a song. They also get to describe the accompaniment they want. Many say, “let’s do this without instruments,” (or, in the parlance that has developed at our house, “holster your capellas”). Sometimes we flip a coin to see whether we’re going clockwise or counter-clockwise around the room. This can be a big deal, since it can take more than an hour to get around a big circle. *Rise Up Singing (the Bible). Alas, as our group ages, this glorious book becomes increasingly less relevant. The font is now way too small for us. A Rise Up Singing that our group could read would be thicker than the Tokyo phonebook. Nonetheless, many folks still bring it, and still depend on it. As their turn approaches, you can see them flipping through it, necks bowed, squinting at the tiny, tiny words. *Tuning. We start the evening by tuning together, and stop to tune occasionally. Staying in tune makes the evening so much better (ironically, after tuning for fifteen minutes, we traditionally lift off the party with The Beatles’ “One After 909,” which invariably knocks everything right back out of tune).
