A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TORONTO FRIDAY NIGHT SONG CIRCLE

On a Friday night in early September 1984, a group of about 30 people gathered to sing together. Twenty years later, we're still doing it, although most of the faces have changed. Because most of the current song circlers weren't there in 1984, I've written a brief history of the song circle.

I went to The Woods Music and Dance Camp for the first time in 1983 and just loved it. At the end of the 1984 Woods, I stood up and said, "We don't have to wait until next summer to sing together. Anyone who's interested in getting together in Toronto to sing regularly throughout the year, please put your name and phone number on this sheet of paper I'm going to circulate." About 20 people signed the sheet.

In early September, Sue Goldberg, Pam Halpern, and Isabel Fryszberg and I had supper at a small Japanese restaurant in the Annex to talk about what we envisioned. I offered my place as the first location and we divided up the names on the list and phoned everyone.

About 30 people came, including Michael Cooney, who'd been on staff at The Woods that summer and supported our endeavour. We sang a few songs ("There's a Long Long Trail Awinding" is the one I mainly remember), and then we had what seemed like an interminable discussion about what night of the week to meet. Saturday meant conflicts with the country dances and lots of concerts, Sunday song circles would have to end early because of work the next day, and weeknights were problematic for the same reason. Friday (although it was a conflict for observant Jews, as some pointed out) just seemed the best option.

We decided to meet on two Fridays each month, the first and the third. In the early days, we took a very active role in bringing songs to the circle, often making copies so that everyone could learn a song that was well received. We had an accordion folder with multiple copies of our songs. Each session, someone was responsible for bringing the accordion folder and then passing it on to someone, often the host for the next session. Some people collected their favourite songs in large personal binders. We went through a lot of paper in those days, but we did learn some songs that became part of our general repertoire.

In the early days, we took a more active role in organizing evenings. For a while, we had Fourth Friday workshops, held (not surprisingly) on the fourth Friday of each month. Some of them were led by musicians (for example, John Allan Cameron led one) and we asked people to pay $5 or $10 for a musician's fee. Other Fourth Fridays were simply evenings when we all brought songs on a specific theme, such as songs with Canadian place names in them. Lots of fun, they were much like the song circle last year at Tony and Gail's where, on Tony's suggestion, we each sang a song that someone else usually sings.

The song circles began to grow in size so that they were sometimes uncomfortably crowded, with between 30 and 40 people, a size that's hard for many houses to handle. We met for a few months in the basement of a church near Broadview and Gerrard, but we agreed it wasn't as homey, and arranging drinks and treats was more complicated. (I realized another disadvantage of the church location one night when there was a heavy snowfall and I sat alone in the church for about 45 minutes before I realized no one was coming and I went home, feeling rather lonely.) We decided to meet weekly to try to spread the numbers out and make the size more manageable. I remember some concern that we might not get enough people for a musical quorum some nights, but we needn't have worried. We moved very smoothly into a weekly format and the numbers became manageable.

Somewhere in those first 10 years, we arrived at the point where as a group, we knew a fair number of songs that we could all sing the chorus on: "The Alabama," "Angel Band," "Hillcrest Mines," "Hymn to Pincher Creek," "I Like to Rise," "Hard Times," "Rolling Home to Caledonia," "Rolling Home," "Roseville Fair," "Sweet Jubilation," "Thanksgiving Eve," and many many more. We became fairly adept at finding and learning good chorus songs. We began to impress newcomers who would listen in awe as our voices swelled into multipart harmony on our favourites.

But things weren't always sweetly harmonious. Some people complained that we didn't have enough new material, so there was a period when everyone brought song sheets for new songs regularly. At some point (I'm vague on dates; please tell me if you know), we discovered Rise Up Singing, a popular songbook that Bob Aaron used to order by the box from the publisher and sell at a discounted price whenever there was a surge of interest. A wonderful indexed resource, it provides the words and chords (though not the music) for hundreds of folksongs, but sometimes our faces were buried in the book as we stumbled through songs that no one really knew well. Some folks suggested (well, mainly Tam bitched) that we should learn songs rather than read them from a book, and of course, he's right that a song improves once you've learned it by memory. To make his point, he once tried to set alight a piece of paper that one singer was reading from!

Over the years, we've had discussions about starting on time, tuning instruments (please do!), taking breaks promptly at 10:30, having many singers singing along on the verses as well as the choruses (it just doesn't sound very good), and having many instrumentalists playing at the same time (we found the sound of seven guitars playing together just isn't very pleasing, and it also drowns out the singers). We've worked to find a balance between instrumentalists wanting to jam on every song and singers wanting their words to be heard, between songwriters wanting a place to perform their new songs and singers wanting to sing, not just listen. We've suggested that when it's your turn, you can choose which instruments you want to accompany you, including of course the choice of no instruments, but few people take that opportunity. After 20 years, the song circle seems to have found its identity as a safe place to sing (even if you've never sung before), with the emphasis on the joy of making harmonious music together.

To welcome newcomers to the song circle and acquaint them with the way things work, Linda Miland (now living in Ottawa) wrote something called The Unwritten Rules of the Song Circle, a summary of our musical etiquette.

In the early years, we all shared the responsibilities of starting the singing, keeping things moving along (people who have attended other song circles like the Kitchener one have suggested we should move more quickly from singer to singer than we do), giving feedback, and taking breaks. More recently, this role has shifted to the host, although some hosts seem unaware of this or are uncomfortable with the role.

I think part of the reason the song circle has lasted so long is that it works with so little effort and organization on anyone's part. For years, we simply decided future locations at the break, and wrote them into our datebooks. That changed with the rising popularity of email in the mid-1990s, when Debbie Carroll and Tony Burns volunteered to organize and send out song circle location information by email to a list that quickly grew to about 90 recipients. Debbie and Tony's work makes location information available to anyone with email (and in case you're wondering, that's 99% of us). 

Over the years, people have moved away. Pam Halpern and Isabel Fryszberg, although both in Toronto, stopped coming to the song circle years ago, leaving Sue and me as the original instigators. Some members of our circle have died, including Tara White, Els Bell, Clair Grebow, Shelley Gordon, Wilf Grignon, and Anne Marie Quinn. We've held song circles in hospital rooms, offering musical comfort to very sick friends and sung at funerals. We've also sung at joyful events like Tam and Lynn's wedding in 2002 and Eve and Ellen's wedding in June 2004.

But new members are always arriving, often having heard about the song circle at The Woods Music and Dance Camp. I gain a great deal of satisfaction from knowing that I've been part of creating something that gives so many of us such pleasure and that I hope will outlive me. I love to think of people gathering in each other's living rooms 40 years from now to sing together.

Susan Lawrence, September 8, 2004

P.S. I welcome corrections to this. Please contact me at susan.lawrence@sympatico.ca