Singing through the decades: 2. 1970-1974

 INTRODUCTION

Yes I know I said I would do a page for each decade, but the 1970s were my teenage years, where like most teenagers, I changed and developed quite a lot, so the world inhabited by ten year old me still at primary school in 1970 was a rather different one to that inhabited by a 19 year old undergraduate. So I've split the 70s down the middle for the purposes of this blog.

1.Bible Class

At about age 11 I graduated from Sunday School to a group for teenagers called Bible Class. This was on Sunday afternoon (just like Sunday School). I didn't particularly enjoy it as the leaders had a rather dull approach, but I learnt some new songs, from the very trendy books we used at the time called 'Youth Praise' (Book 1 was green and Book 2 was orange)

Here is a song from one of them that I have never encountered since ... cant find it anywhere online! There are a few lines I cant remember hence the 'la la las'

2. School Choir

So now I am at Grammar school, and at some point I joined the Junior Choir. (For reasons that I can't begin to understand now, I never joined the Senior choir - even though I was taking O level Music at the time .... I can't understand NOT being in a choir now, when one was freely available to me!!) This was the first time I sang alto, something I have been doing ever since.  A memorable performance we did, along with other girls taking part as actors and dancers was the cantata 'Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo. I can still remember most of the words ... saw it performed by a local choir in 2019 which brought back such vivid memories of school...

3. Family

We were a musical family and we sang a lot. (For instance we made up songs about my sister's toy dog!) The song I bring to you here is not made up by us, but it is probably one of my first attempts at musical arrangement/performance ... certainly the first recording of such a thing. My two sisters and I used to sing it on long car journeys with my middle sister singing the tune, youngest sister singing a floaty descant, and myself adding an alto part. This is a genuine ancient audio recording of us singing, retrieved from a cassette tape from the 1970's (so quality is not brilliant) 

4. Youth Fellowship

This was a group for teenagers/young twenties after the Gospel service on Sunday evenings. It involved chatting under dim coloured lights with Johnny Cash playing in the background, and munching on KP Skips ... then a time of singing and finally an epilogue. The songs were all written in capital letters by hand, on thick sheets of coloured card that fitted into a home-made easel. Looking back, the leaders put in an awful lot of effort! This was my favourite song, and I believe it was written by a friend of one of our leaders ... Google certainly doesn't seem to know it anyway!!

5. School Music lessons

Although I eventually went on to take O level music, involving actual study of the subject, learning about composers and Music theory etc, lower down the school whenever 'Music' was on the timetable it seemed to consist entirely of the class gathering around the grand piano and singing folk songs. (No other subject involved such a massive change in focus from the lower school to O level). 'Red River Valley' is one song we sang in those sessions, that I have not encountered since. It turns out that there are endless versions of this song, and I couldn't find a recording using the words I knew. But I did find some sheet music. You can see the first page here, and the second page as a masked preview ... the missing words on page two should be '...hasten to bid us adieu, But remember...'

6. Way to Life Crusade

Dick Saunders was an evangelist who toured the country running evangelistic 'crusades'. Three times in my formative years I recall him in our area, in a tent in the Christchurch Park in the 60s, in a dome shaped tent on waste ground at Bramford Rd in the early 70s and in Burlington Baptist church when I was in sixth form (this time I was in the choir!) The theme song for his crusades, certainly the early ones, was 'Life is Wonderful. Sadly, once more I have been unable to find a recording. So here is the music.

(and yes, I have just realised I got this from Youth Praise, see first item on page ... I do have both Youth Praise books so I could have looked up the words to 'Little candle' ... but preferred to do it from memory!! even if it meant some words were missing!)

7. Dad's Quartet

I already mentioned my father's male voice quartet in my Desert Island Discs post (as they used to practice weekly in our house, thus preventing me from watching Top of the Pops!!) This was group of friends who sang old fashioned gospel songs in churches and Old People's homes. Many of these old songs I first heard in the context of this quartet (and because of this I sometimes had difficulty picking out the tune, as their counter tenor had a very piercing voice, and he rarely if ever carried the melody!!) This is one song I will always associate with them. Their arrangement changed the rhythm on the final verse from 4/4  to 6/8.

8. School Assembly

Before we move on to the next 'era' I wanted to revisit the school assembly. Now at Grammar School this was a much more formal event than at Primary school, with echoes of civic religion. There was not very much overlap between the hymns at school and those 'Brethreny' hymns and Gospel Songs that I knew from my own background,  We used an Anglican hymnbook called 'Songs of Praise'. Many of the hymns we sung are standard mainstream Anglican hymns that I still sing today in the URC, but a few are indelibly associated in my mind with this particular setting - I don't think I have ever sung this hymn since school.