The History of RISE UP SINGING
Way back in 1973 Peter was a counselor at Tamarack Farm (a summer camp for teenagers in Vermont). The camp did a lot of group singing but the camp songbook didn't include any of the songs campers wanted to sing at the time: songs that were popularized by the Beatles, Peter Paul & Mary, Dylan, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger. A group of campers, including Peter, met together all summer working on creating a new songbook. The group chose a lot of songs they wanted to include and grouped them into easy to remember chapters like "Sea Songs", "Spirituals", and "Freedom". The idea was to include lyrics and chords but no music. It was a bigger job than could be finished in one summer so the project was never finished.
Peter eventually created a songbook, with the help of a lot of wonderful friends involved in the Movement for New Society in West Philadelphia, called Winds of the People. It was published informally in 1979. It was an "underground book" because not all the song were fully licensed. The book wasn't sold in stores but by word of mouth. It ended up selling 30,000 copies out of people's homes across the country.
Shortly after that, in 1981, Peter and Annie met each other. They began leading sing alongs together using Winds of the People. As a graphic artist, Annie naturally joined the project of editing Winds of the People, fixing mistakes, adding a few illustrations, and doing "paste up" on the latter editions. While working together on the later editions Annie and Peter decided to join forces to "make the book legal". Eventually they approached Sing Out, a non-profit folk music organization founded by Pete Seeger in 1950. Pete Seeger and his wife Toshi were on the board of directors at that time. Annie and Peter went to the board together and asked them if they would help publish their songbook. At that meeting Pete and Toshi both spoke eloquently in support of the proposal, saying "This is just why we created Sing Out! Magazine - to encourage ordinary people to sing with each other". It was then decided that Sing Out would publish the new songbook.
Getting together a selection team consisting mainly of song leaders was the next task. A number of weekends were planned where the selection team would sing potential songs together, trying them out for inclusion in the book. The list was long. The criteria was to include songs that were relatively easy to sing and play by the lay musician, songs that lent themselves to singing in groups, that were not too obscure, and songs that had an emphasis on empowerment with a positive message of hope, justice, and aspirations for a better world.
This work was all being done well before the internet era so lyrics and liner notes had to be painstakingly written down off resources like record albums in WXPN's folk music library (which the team had access to because Annie was a DJ there) or copied out of songbooks at the Library of Congress. Annie and Peter drove to DC and personally went into the Library of Congress which still used the Dewey Decimal system at that time. It took Peter two full years of work writing to and calling copyright holders. Annie helped keep lists in order and communicated with the team as well as certain artists. Pete Seeger's manager Harold Leventhal was enormously helpful in getting big music publishers like Warner Brothers and Hal Leonard to agree to license their songs for Rise Up Singing. Mark Moss, Sing Out's editor and executive director, worked tirelessly on getting the book typeset in very early publishing software and providing oversight of the project in a myriad ways.
Artist Kore Loy McWhirter came and spent two months in our home in Glen Mills, PA, helping Annie to illustrate and layout the book. Loy's wonderful and phantasmal illustrations were a huge contribution to the fairytale and homegrown feel of the book. In those early days, folk musician Sam Hinton worked on creating hand calligraphized chapter headings and wrote out all of the song titles in the book by hand. Annie did the paste up for the book with Loy's help, using a drafting table, T-squares, layout boards, and an old fashioned wax machine. As they worked Annie and Loy would pause to create an illustration or cartoon to fit in between the songs on a page. Loy was especially gifted in creating incredible images on the spot. Having illustrations not only created a homegrown look, but helped fill the extra space created when laying out entire songs within a 2 page spread. Keeping musicians from having to turn a page mid-song within each was one of the many songbook goals.
Rise Up Singing was published by Sing Out in August of 1988. Without the benefit of any kind of commercial promotion or publicity the book began to catch on. When Annie and Peter took the songbook on a nation wide tour (across Canada and all around the US) in1990 sales really took off like wildfire. People loved having the ability to carry around the words to so many of their favorite songs in one small book. It was a resource folks wanted. In those early years we had no idea that Rise Up Singing would end up selling around a million copies over the next 25 years. As we come up to our 40th year in print and 15 editions later, the songbook continues to be passed on to younger generations. Children who grew up on the songbook are now passing the book on to their children.
We are absolutely overjoyed and thrilled that today, Rise Up Singing is being published by Country Dance and Song Society. They are a wonderful fit for Rise Up Singing, a songbook that (from its early incarnations and inception) was meant to be a resource to help people to come together in community, spreading love and hope through music and singing.
- Annie Patterson and Peter Blood