Community Singing

Extract

Af EW months ago ninety thousand sporting men, before settling down to the serious business of football at the London Stadium, sang the well-known hymn ‘Abide with me,’ or ‘Mane nobiscum quoniam advesfer ascii’ A Catholic who had heard it told me it was Great.’ He meant that he had no other means of describing the powerful effect of the hymn thus sung by this huge, haphazard choir. I asked about tHe general demeanour during this act of Christian devotion. My friend informed me that the hymn was sung with apparent reverence, with conviction, and with unmistakable satisfaction by every man in that vast assembly.

The episode is significant. The world has dis covered a fact which the Church has known from her cradle: that where two or three units, hundreds or thousands are gathered together, they want to sing. Hitherto almost the only outlet for this urgent instinct has been congregational singing in the churches; but as men have, in the main, given up church-going altogether, the instinct runs to waste. The thought occurred to somebody that it might be organised to suit a useful social purpose. The result is community singing. But, although the catalogues have all been ransacked over and over again (for community songs must be old songs), the organisers find a difficulty in providing acceptable fare. The crowds are hard to please; they will not swallow every bait. At a pinch, for want of better, traditional Southerners will sing the federal John Brown's Body, invoke again for the thousandth time the ghost of Annie Laurie, and grow happier while ‘Poor Mary is a-weeping’ ; but the kind of song that forces men to sing, and women too, even though its words are only vaguely comprehensible, is Shenandoah; for the successful community song must have its special characteristics.