
Contents
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Introduction Introduction
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The Flint Community Music Association The Flint Community Music Association
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The Sings The Sings
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Participatory Singing and Community Music Participatory Singing and Community Music
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Bowen Leaves Flint Bowen Leaves Flint
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The Peabody Prep The Peabody Prep
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Wartime Singing Wartime Singing
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Decline Decline
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Conclusion Conclusion
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Notes Notes
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References References
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45 Community Singing, the Church of England, and Spirituality: The Singer, the Song, and the Singing
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27 Community Singing in Flint and Baltimore, 1917–1920
Get accessEsther M. Morgan-Ellis is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of North Georgia, where she also directs the orchestra and coaches the old-time string band. She studies participatory music-making traditions of the past and present, employing both historical and ethnographic methodologies. She has published on the American community singing movement, mediated sing-alongs, Sacred Harp singing, old-time string band music, and music history pedagogy, and is also active as a cellist, fiddler and fiddle teacher, and singer.
Alan L. Spurgeon is Professor Emeritus of Music Education at the University of Mississippi. He has pursued two areas of research interest and publishing: Anglo American folk music, especially in the Ozarks region, and the history of music education in the United States. He is the author of Waltz the Hall: The American Play Party, as well as various research articles on early 20th-century music education. He is currently working on a book about collecting British ballads in the Arkansas and Missouri Ozarks.
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Published:22 May 2024
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Abstract
This chapter presents two case studies of community singing activity during the Great War, during which community singing was promoted as a wholesome pastime and patriotic activity not only in US Army and Navy training camps but in civilian communities large and small. By the end of the war, community singing had become a mainstream activity. In Flint, Michigan, George Oscar Bowen (1872–1957) was hired by the Community Music Association (CMA) to develop programming in support of its aims. Flint was a prosperous automobile manufacturing city of around 110,000 inhabitants, and many of the plant workers, most of whom came from Eastern Europe, were new immigrants to the United States. The CMA was founded, in part, to help instill patriotism among these new Americans. As director, Bowen led large group sings in the high school stadium as well as smaller noontime sing-alongs in the factories during the workers’ lunch hour. In Baltimore, community singing activities were spearheaded by May Garrettson Evans (1866–1947), founder and superintendent of the Peabody Preparatory Division, and music educator Henrietta Baker Low (1869–1960). During the Great War, Evans and Low left public singing activities to the men of the city but maintained an active singing program within the walls of the Prep. By considering the activities of these organizers in parallel, we gain insight into the gendered spheres of wartime community singing.
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