[Landline] Singing

Junior Soprano, Lovers Rock, soccer chants, Rod Stewart, Tony Bennett, more

Oct 22, 2023

Continuing on from the last Landline, where we talked about the magic (and logistical and ethical challenges) of music performance outdoors, outside of conventional venues, outside of conventional audiences—and maybe also because I’ve been reading Cosmic Scholar, John Szwed’s masterful new biography on Harry Smith, the great delineator—I’ve been thinking about a few somewhat connected things.

That is,

The pleasure of hearing a professional sing, a cappella, outdoors, without amplification…

The pleasure of hearing a professional sing, without amplification, in a concert hall setting, as Tony Bennett did, routinely…

The pleasure—and special emotional weight—of hearing a nonprofessional sing, without amplification, in a family setting…

If you’e ever experienced music like this in person, you know what I’m talking about. There’s a special, profound hush and joy and poignancy that occurs. An altogether different order of depth is reached, one that I wish we experienced more regularly.

Then there’s another category, maybe my favorite of all: public communal singing.

(Here is where I would insert a clip of that breathtaking, dreamy scene in the “Lovers Rock” film from Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ series [2020] where the partygoers sing, a capella, Janet Kay’s 1979 hit, ‘Silly Games.’ But I can’t find a video of it, so you’ll have to go here to see a snippet.)

In 2011, the Brooklyn Rail published a short piece by poet-philosopher-historian-anarchist-artist-etc Peter Lamborn Wilson that was quietly, typically devastating. It was called "Words Without Song.“ Here’s an excerpt:

When was the last time you heard anyone singing in the street?

I mean, not at some “street fair” with mic and an electric backup group. Not a professional singer. Just someone walking in the street and singing aloud. For joy or melancholy, or even just mindlessly. Not humming off-key while listening to an earbud or whatever it’s called (“brain implant,” for instance). No, just simply…singing.

Since I live in a WASP-ish, artsy upstate village where singing in public might seem dangerous or anti-social, I asked my Brooklyn friend James, the music teacher and concert pianist, “When was the last time you heard anyone singing in the street?” And he answered: “Except for one insane guy who thinks he’s an opera diva and sings arias around Park Slope, it has actually been a very long time since I heard anyone sing in the street.” Other people I’ve quizzed on the subject over the last few years tend to agree.

My village is a college town, but no drunken version of “Boola-Boola” ever rends the night. The students are frequently drunk, but the only nocturnal noise they make is “Wooo-wooo!” or “FUUUUCK.” No ukelele plinks to a high tenor beneath any sorority window. No upright piano plunks for jolly amateurs on dark summer porch. And no singing in the street. Ever.

Admittedly all this amounts to nothing but anecdotal evidence. I’ve reached the age of the Senior Discount, and am nursing a no doubt drug-distorted memory of the Way Things Used to Be. For example, I remember taking the bus home from work in Baltimore one evening in 1966 or so, and everyone on the bus was singing along with some Motown hit, maybe “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay.”

I can remember walking home late one snowy night in Tehran (Iran) in 1972 and hearing a lone night-watchman chanting a ghazal by Hafez as he warmed his hands over a barrel fire. But then in “primitive Asia,” lots of people were always singing in the street, or at least chanting their prayers in public. India, Africa, Indonesia—a veritable cacophony of amateurs, possibly still singing even today, despite all technological progress. Only in America and Europe, I suspect, have we indeed achieved a kind of Silent Spring—but it’s people, rather than birds, who have lost their personal songs…

Well.

In 2021, around the time when Covid started to recede, my wife discovered that we could stream all the English Premier League football (soccer) matches we wanted for $8 a month on Peacock.

Suddenly, after a year and a half of closed concert halls, bars and music clubs, here was live music again, in the form of the traditional spontaneous chanting and singing by masses of football fans around the pitch. It was an absolutely glorious, near-continuous sound, made better by being mixed so loud in the broadcasts that the commentators’ voices were often buried. The sound was so powerful that even at television’s remove, I got the goosebumps, and sometimes tears, that I used to get when I was moved by an in-person performance.

We rarely understood what was being sung. (Two seasons later, we still don’t.) In those moments, that wasn’t essential. What was important was we were hearing people singing. Together. Unamplified. Without any accompaniment. In public. In other words, something like what Peter Wilson was writing about.

As Nick Miller wrote in a very thorough 2021 article in The Athletic:

Every club has chants. From the smallest non-League team to the European champions: they might not be unique, they might not be clever, they might not be particularly tuneful, but everyone sings. It’s one of the things that binds everyone together.
But why are chants so important? Why are they so intrinsic to football? How do chants start? How do they spread? What makes a good chant? How does it feel when you start a chant? How does it feel to have a chant about you? Where do some of the better known/stranger chants come from?

Miller’s answers are at the link. But if you don’t have time for that, at least check out this utterly astonishing news piece from Liverpool in 1964…

Okay, enough from me. I know there’s so many more examples of “singing in the streets”/in public—gospel singing, shape note singing, beergarden singing, street corner singing, holiday caroling, etc—but these are the example videos that came to mind right away. Definitely send me videos, stories, experiences, ideas of such — as well as any unamplified, a cappella performances by professional musicians you may have witnessed or heard about — that you’d like shared with Landliners. Simply hit the reply on this email and start typing, or post directly to the Landline Comments section using the handy comment button below. Thanks!

LANDLINE by Jay Babcock

Discussion about this post