Singing in My Mysteries

In the 1800s, music created by regular folks played a much larger role in life than it does today. People didn’t have TV or radio or CD players or YouTube or Spotify or iTunes for passively enjoying music. They made their music, by playing whistles, horns, flutes, fiddles, melodeons. They sang, in parlors and taverns and barbershops and on village greens and in churches.

I’ve been a singer most of my life. I can still remember songs my dad used to sing (generally off key). Hymns from church. Songs from grade school in the late 1950s and the ‘60s. I sang in a church youth choir and in junior and senior high choruses. As an adult, I sing in the shower, when I’m driving a car, and when riding my horse. In my fifties, I sang in a barbershop quartet: Learning to create that exacting a cappella harmony taught me to listen carefully and blend my voice with those of others.

I sing in a hospice chorus (currently suspended because of the pandemic). Our 20 or so members know more than 150 songs from many different cultures and genres. Groups of four or five of us sing for folks in hospice care, and for their friends and families gathered around. At times we have sung for people who were actively dying. It’s a privilege and a deeply moving experience to be invited into that personal setting of love, grief, and passage.

I’m also one third of an amateur singing trio called Yestermorn. Steve Maleski (tenor), Suzanne Rhodes (alto), and I (baritone) specialize in American roots music: folk, Appalachian, spiritual, and shape note songs.

Yestermorn. Left to right: Charles Fergus, Suzanne Rhodes, and Steve Maleski. Photo by Julie Lang.

Listen to Yestermorn sing “Hard Times Come Again No More,” an 1854 parlor song by Stephen Foster.

Few 19th-century rural or small-town churches could afford pianos, let alone organs. People used their voices to make a joyful noise. Many of the hymns they sang came from shape note tunebooks that were then popular. Shape note singing instructors circulated from one community to another, with churches hiring them to teach congregants how to read music and sing.

In a scene in A Stranger Here Below, my main character Gideon Stoltz takes part in a shape note singing: “Gideon enjoyed the strange and unexpected harmonies; he often found himself humming or singing the songs later, when splitting firewood or working at his desk or riding somewhere on his horse. The hymns’ poetry, their lyrics, never failed to move him. Each song, it seemed, had the power to inspire him, or terrify him, or uplift him – or wound him. Some of them made him recall things he didn’t want to remember. Like his memmi’s death.”

Later in the novel, Gideon travels through the wilds of Colerain County and stays overnight in a roadside tavern. After supper, there’s music: “The girl laid a dulcimer on her lap. She strummed the strings with the quill end of a black-and-white turkey feather and sang about a girl named Barbara Allen and a boy named Willie Grove. Though death be printed on his face, and o’er his heart be stealing, yet little better shall he be, for bonny Barb’ry Allen. The dulcimer left a buzzing drone hanging in the air. The fire lit the girl’s profiled face while putting her downcast eyes in shadow. She sang another song, and another, as Gideon and the two older women listened.”

When asked to do a reading from A Stranger Here Below, I often choose a scene in which Gideon, distressed following the suicide of his mentor, Judge Hiram Biddle, attends a shape note singing. He joins his fellow churchgoers in a hymn called “Idumea.” Typical for shape note, it’s in the minor mode, haunting and spare. It starts: “And am I born to die? To lay this body down! And must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown?” It goes on for three more verses. In my reading, I sing the verses, interspersed with prose passages that I don’t sing.

As folks listen to my combined reading and singing, I hope they gain insight into how people thought and lived – and made music – in the early 1800s. Often I get the sense that they’d like to join in, too.