After college graduation in May 1963, I spent the summer at the American Baptist Assembly grounds in Green Lake, WI, as an ice cream shop clerk, immediately gaining back all the weight I'd lost just before my senior year.
That summer, musically, was kind of like Baptist summer camp, with songfests weekly around a campfire, a little choir drummed up by the music director, and a review of a lot of Sunday School songs dressed up by the changed voices of the boys who were once sopranos and had, over time, become tenors and basses.
I'd been urged to come by a sort-of boyfriend who was part of a musical quartet invited to provide worship service music. The romance cooled shortly after we arrived at Green Lake, but the music continued in staff housing and in theatrical productions. And it took on a distinctive social-justice flavor.
The South was tumultuous in the summer of 1963 and the issues of voting rights for black people, unions for blue collar workers, and women's reproductive rights were part of our cultural milieu, even far far north of the Southern states. And the songs of social upheaval were what we sang around the campfires and after hours.
At the end of the summer, I returned to my parents' home in small town Washington, as I had no job prospects, and attempted to get back in step with conservative theologies and hymnody. But I had learned enough about more progressive hymn writers and modern theologies of freedom that I craved music other than what we always had sung in my dad's churches.
I accepted the invitation to lead the junior choir, where I could make my own choices about songs to teach them and felt daring as I chose less traditional Christmas and Easter songs for them to sing. Not that "I wonder as I wander" is particularly daring in itself, but it does push the envelope a bit, though it was irresistible to even the most hidebound mama in the congregation when her angelic Ruthie sang the plaintive verses in a sweet, pure soprano.
A job came along and I let someone else lead the junior choir, as I explored the new freedom of living away from home for a full year, living in the Columbia River Gorge in a tiny apartment and serving a small WA county's welfare recipients. No music, except for records, but I did join the Columbia Record Club where you could select several records for a dollar and just pay postage.
I remember that I discovered the Swingle Singers, Norman Luboff Choir, Robert Shaw Chorale, and played and replayed the two albums our college choir had recorded during my years at Linfield. But there wasn't much radio reception in Stevenson WA, just upriver from Bonneville Dam, so it was records or nothing until I went either to Portland (downriver) or back up to Goldendale (upriver) where reception was better.
After 18 months of serving welfare recipients in the very backwoods of rural Washington, I had a chance to move to Denver CO to be a program worker at the Denver Christian Center, and that will be a story for another day.
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