We Cannot Keep From Singing

This is a post for the musicians and singers out there.

Our church went back to in-person gatherings in the middle of June, but it’s a hybrid format. About 8-12 of us are present physically in the church house. Those who want to join us via Zoom can still do so. We have two computers set up at the front of the church. One is hooked up to the projector and projects the Zoom portion of the service onto the screen at the front. That way, we can see the people at home who are participating. My laptop computer is set up by the piano and gives a view out into the congregation for the people at home.

We’ve had to do some creative tech rigging. The piano isn’t picked up well on just the computer input, so I went to my “box of cables” (we all have one) and pulled out a very old microphone. It came with an educational software package that my kids used almost 20 years ago. The microphone is so old that I had to get a USB adapter for it to hook it up to my laptop. It sits inside the piano. As old as it is, it seems to work well at picking up the sound.

Because singing has been identified as a “superspreader event” for coronavirus, Mennonite Church USA issued a recommendation that churches curtail singing for the foreseeable future. They might as well have asked us to stop breathing. We compromised by having one congregational song at the end of the service, but everyone sings with masks on. I play my usual 10 minutes of prelude before the service, and our pastor has added two more times of music in the order of worship—one where I play a hymn and one where we play a video from YouTube. 

I’ve had to laugh, though, because it’s nearly impossible to keep Mennonites from singing. I can hear people singing and humming along while I am playing prelude. Last week, one of our members sang a hymn on Zoom and everyone around me was humming along quietly, in parts—always in parts. We make up parts if there aren’t any parts.

The day we take off our masks and break into song together again will be a fine day, indeed.

Hymn #580 in the Mennonite Hymnal and Worship Book is “How Can I Keep From Singing?” It’s one of our congregation’s favorites. I’ve got several lovely piano arrangements of it. And my favorite vocal arrangement of this hymn was done by a female group called SheDaisy. This was on their Christmas album, but as an “Easter egg.” The song was not listed anywhere on the CD. The only way to hear it was to allow the final track to play, and then a few moments later, this song started:

Gorgeous.

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DD#1 played the trumpet in high school band, so I got to indulge myself as a “band mother” for a few years. I chaperoned a lot of band trips, one of which was the District Band Festival at Hellgate High School in Missoula. As part of band festival, the kids are asked to sight read a musical arrangement. That year’s selection was an arrangement called “1861” by Jonathan Newman. It is based on a 19th-century Anglican hymn called “Lead Me, Lord.” I was so intrigued by that piece—and that hymn, which I had never heard before—that I came home from band festival and started looking for it. I have a fairly extensive collection of hymnals from many different denominations, but this hymn wasn’t listed in any of them. Finally, I went to the internet. The website Hymnary.org has a search function that brings up every instance of a hymn in just about every hymnal ever published. I typed in “Lead Me, Lord,” and guess what popped up?

“Lead Me, Lord” is hymn #538 in the Mennonite Hymnal and Worship Book.

It had been there the whole time but I didn’t think to look for it in our hymnal.

Somehow, this came up in a discussion between my friend Robert and me. We have been friends since I was 14 and he was 16 because we both played trombone in high school band. For the past decade or so, he has been a low brass instructor for the Akron Bluecoats drum and bugle corps. His big thing is pitch and intonation and listening to yourself and the musicians around you to create the best sound possible. (I know this because I sat next to him in band for two years in high school.)

Robert took this hymn and arranged it as a warm-up piece for the Bluecoats low brass hornline. Because they couldn’t tour this year, the corps had an online telethon a few weeks ago, and Robert sent me this link (it should start at 30:40 in the video):

It’s hard to play this well together in person. The fact that these kids did this virtually is mind-blowing.

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And because I think this is funny, I will leave you with a story about my kids. From the time they were little, we always sang together in the car. We started with a collection of CDs called My Little Yellow Bus, then moved on to Disney soundtracks. (I could probably still sing you every song from “The Little Mermaid”.) If I got tired of kids songs, I made them listen to SheDaisy, Sarah McLachlan, Indigo Girls, Sugarland, the Wailin’ Jennys, or the Dixie Chicks. My mother and sister joined in when they were with us. We once drove down the east coast, from Maryland to North Carolina and back up to Ohio, banging out Miley Cyrus’s “See You Again.” The girls learned how to harmonize. They also learned a few other things on the way.

DD#2 was born in 1997. The Dixie Chicks CD “Fly” came out in 1999, with such memorable tracks as “Goodbye Earl,” about two women who murder the abusive husband of one of the women, hide his body, and go on to live happy lives, and “Sin Wagon,” which includes part of the old hymn “I’ll Fly Away” in it. We were driving somewhere one time with my mother and sister in the car when DD#2—who was probably only about 4 or 5 at the time—said to my sister, “Aunt Beth, what’s a sin wagon?”

Who lets a little kid listen to music like that? LOL. DD#2 has a playlist now with both those songs on it and I just laugh when we’re in the car and she puts it on. Apparently, both girls turned out okay despite their mother’s questionable choice of music.