Book Review: Rise Up Singing

Not Yet A Fair Trade Book, Though Certainly Old Enough

Title: Rise Up Singing

Author: Peter Blood-Patterson

Date: 1988

Publisher: Sing Out

ISBN: 0-86571-138-0

Length: 278 pages including indices

Illustrations: drawings by Kore Loy McWhirter and Anne Blood-Patterson

Quote: “You’d be surprised how much better a song sounds when several voices join in together.”

If there is an official songbook of the baby-boom generation, this is it. By printing song lyrics in a heavily condensed “fakebook” style, the publishers obtained permission to print copyrighted songs as well as traditional ones. The resulting collection (over 1200 songs, with popular variants) may not include every single song we ever sing, and may include a few that nobody you know ever sings, but it comes close.

Here’s the bad news: It’s not designed to pamper aging eyes. In order to fit the text of two to six complete songs on each page, the type is what 8-point type used to look like, before computer pixels inflated the size of typesetting “points.” If you use eye and/or hand glasses to magnify fine print, you’ll want to keep both wherever you keep this book.

The rest of the news about Sing Out is good. It contains everyone’s favorite Beatles and Motown, Baez and Dylan, cowboy and hillbilly, Broadway show tunes and protest songs, spirituals and sea chanteys, pub and Sunday School, Christmas and Hanukah, Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss song lyrics with guitar chords.

Songs are printed alphabetically by title within the categories of America, Ballads, City, Creativity, Dreams, Ecology, Faith, Farm, Freedom, Friendship, Funny, Golden Oldies, Good Times, Gospel, Hard Times (and Blues), Home, Hope, love, Lullabies, Men, Mountain, Outdoors, Peace, Play, Rich & Poor, Rounds, Sacred Rounds, Sea, Spirituals, Struggle, Time, Travel, Unity, Women, and Work.

Since most of the original buyers of this book already knew these songs, musical notation is included only for rounds. The editors assume that you know what the tune sounds like and where to change chords. For those who didn’t know...well, in 1988 I was in Takoma Park, Maryland, and everyone did. If they didn’t, they learned from neighbors at sing-alongs. However, comments on each song mentioned the albums, most available as LPs, cassettes, or CDs in 1988, on which the tune could be heard. There are also "teaching tapes" for selections of the songs.

As most of us not employed in the commercial music industry have always understood, music is not a material object that can naturally be capitalized. Songs “belong to” people for as long as those people are singing them. Then, if the songs don’t move on and become the “property” of those who listened to them, they die. The commercial music producers shot themselves in the foot by trying, not just to protect the right to profit from actual performances or printed sheet music, but to keep songs themselves “private property,” demanding that audiences be always and only passive consumers. They seem even to have succeeded, with the young, by aggressively marketing tuneless recordings that depend on elaborate instrumental effects. Young people don’t sing; they don’t even really listen; they passively take what the industry tells them is fashionable to have for background noise, and use it for that purpose, and don’t even learn to sing along on key any more.

As baby-boomers retire, the good news on that front is that it becomes our job to teach our grandchildren what we failed to teach their parents: Songs themselves are not, cannot be, property. It’s fun to listen passively to other people’s recordings. It’s even more fun to sing along, learn words and tunes, and be able to sing songs with friends. Most people (by definition) don’t have extraordinarily beautiful voices; many commercial music stars don’t either. Extraordinary voices are not necessary. As Pete Seeger, who had a pleasant ordinary voice, some prematurely formed opinions that cost him “stardom,” and, probably as a result, a long healthy slow-paced singing career, explains in the foreword to this book: songs sound better when lots of people sing them together. Music is synergistic.

Pete Seeger is no longer with us, but the Blood-Pattersons are active in cyberspace at https://riseupandsing.org/ and have produced a second collection called Rise Again. They've kept these books in print through their own small press. So you should buy the books as NEW books, from Amazon or directly from them, to encourage them; they're not all that expensive. You may support your favorite web site by ordering new books here, yes. Send $20 for either volume, $5 per package for shipping either volume or both of them together, and $1 per online payment, as discussed at the Payment Information page.