Community Sing Along at the Growing Center 6/20

[candyleonard.livejournal.com]

Friends of the Growing Center will be hosting an all-ages Community Sing Along at the Growing Center on 6/20 from 5-7pm. We will be doing selections from the Rise Up Singing songbook - traditional and contemporary songs we all know and love. Bring food, blankets, drums, guitars, tambourines, friends, neighbors, etc. A splendid time is guaranteed for all! Donations accepted.

The Growing Center is just outside Union Square on Vinal Ave, between Highland Ave and Summer Street.

Comments

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

Rise Up Singing songbook - traditional and contemporary songs we all know and love.

I am a summer camp counselor from way back in the Hudson Valley Region of NYS, so *of course* I'm familiar with Rise Up Singing. It's truly required reading/ singing for hippies and post-hippies of a certain kind, and I probably qualify, thus, as someone heartily included in "we all know and love." However, if you are intending that this be an open and welcoming event to people of a range of cultural experiences, I might suggest a different wording that doesn't set up an "in group/out group" around a particular type of folksinging experience. Perhaps mentioning something about good songleading? A good songleader can bring people in who have never heard these songs before and they can have a great time. The wonder of much folk music, and I believe most of the songs in RUS qualify, is that they are not challenging to the voice, the range, or most times, the vocabulary, and because of this are great for bringing together people of different cultural and linguistic experiences. However, for some of us, these songs are *already* part of our cultural experience, and it's really easy to exclude people for whom this might be a new genre.

Anyway, I'm responding only out of my own perception of what you're aiming for here. I hope you have a great event, and if I were free, I'd be there with bells, tambourines, and kazoos on! I hope that this message is received in the spirit in which it's written: as a sincere offer of ways to be more welcoming to the wonderful diversity Somerville has to offer.

[soft-shoulder.livejournal.com]

Omgosh, I just had Mitch Miller flashbacks.