by Peter Lasersohn
This first appeared in Lasersohn's blog, A Quaker Historical Lexicon, 21st of 7th mo., 2011.
An interesting historical Quaker linguistic practice is the "sing-song," also sometimes called "intoning": a chanted style of vocal ministry which was formerly very common, but is now virtually extinct. I am told that there are still one or two Friends in Ohio Yearly Meeting who occasionally preach in the sing-song style; but in all other regions I think it has been many decades since the sing-song was used, and it has not been common for more than a hundred years.
Like most Friends nowadays, I have never heard the sing-song in person, so I can't speak about it from personal experience. The only recording of it I have ever heard is in a sound file on the Haverford College Library website. Unfortunately, the recording consists of two Friends reading or reciting historical Quaker sermons in sing-song style for demonstration purposes, not of authentic examples of sing-song occurring spontaneously in worship. The text accompanying the sound file states that "this practice has now died out, though a few examples have been recorded in sound," which would seem to imply that other recordings exist — do readers know of any?
To my ear, the Haverford recordings sound surprisingly "high church," reminiscent of the chanted prayer I've heard delivered by Catholic and Orthodox priests (though the performers do not have very polished singing voices, in contrast to some of the priests I have heard). In fact, 19th century author James Rush suspected that the Quaker sing-song actually derived historically from Catholic chant:
The use of the minor third … seems to be a vocal tradition, still kept up among the English. The Quakers, particularly their women, in public preaching, employ it to an extravagant degree; and, from the incorrigible character of all sectarianism, probably had it in the time of Fox; whose followers may have derived it through the earlier Protestants, from some awkward imitation of chanting, in the Catholic service.
—The Philosophy of the Human Voice, p. 539 (1867)
Whether there is any likelihood this account of the origins of the sing-song might be correct, I do not know. It seems at least as likely that chanting while modulating the voice by minor thirds has some sort of innate or natural basis. This was, in fact, suggested by Robert de Valcourt, a contemporary of Rush:
The Quakers, Methodists, &c., in their religious exercises, run into a sing-song monotony, changing the pitch by minor thirds. This is, probably, the simplest and rudest form of chanting; and seems to be the spontaneous expression of certain kinds of excitement or fervor of feeling.
—The Illustrated Manners Book, p. 177 (1855)
The actual word sing-song as a name for Quaker intoned preaching does not appear in writing, as far as I have been able to discover, until well into the 19th century. Most early uses of this term are by former Quakers or non-Quakers, and often seem to carry a disrespectful or even derogatory tone:
Some of the most ignorant simpletons in civilized society get inspired to preach among them; and "shear [sic] nonsense" indeed do they deliver : while tremulous gesticulation, groaning, drawling, whining, grimace, and most unearthly tunes of vocal sing-song, are the relief, and the accompaniment, and the compensation.
—Samuel Hanson Cox, Quakerism not Christianity, p. 604 (1833)
Cox was a former Quaker who became a Presbyterian minister. He was well-known as an orator, and was a leading abolitionist.
I did listen with surprise to a short, but energetic exhortation, in good language and devoid of the ordinary whine and sing-song accompaniments; though still characterised by the intermittent and passionate style of delivery common to all the Quaker-preachers male and female, whom I had heard before.
—The Quakers' Carnival in Dublin, The Metropolitan, vol. 1, p. 167 (1831)
The author of this last article goes on to describe how the preacher he was describing was held in low regard by her meeting, since her unintoned ministry seemed too well thought-out to be authentically inspired!
Even when Quakers themselves begin to use the term sing-song in print, in the second half of the 19th century, it is used mainly in a critical or even mocking fashion:
At present, we are not, at our school, initiated into the mysteries of do, re, me, &c.; so I cannot in the text give any idea of this (to me) most revolting sing-song. It is astonishing that persons of fair intellectual attainments, who everywhere else, and at all times beside, speak with a natural tone, and in a simple and unaffected manner, should, the moment they open their lips on the rising-seat ignore all the laws of elocution and common sense.
—James Bunker Congdon, Quaker Quiddities, or Friends in Council, p. 41 (1860)
Congdon's book, consisting of a satirical poem with explanatory notes, was published when he was an undergraduate. He notes in the introduction that he was acting contrary to discipline by not first gaining the approval of the Meeting for Sufferings, but says he is too young to be subject to disownment.
Elizabeth Coale was an elder in Benjaminville Monthly Meeting, near Bloomington, Illinois, wrote about the practice in 1906:
The local meeting has six or seven preachers. Some of these were gifted (?) in a remarkable degree with the old-time sing-song of the Quaker ministry, and so intensified that the words were often drowned in the music (?) so that their sound and meaning were obscured to a great extent; but a deep solemnity and earnestness pervaded the assembly…
—Elizabeth Coale, 'A Conservative Yearly Meeting in Iowa', Friends Intelligencer, vol. 63, no. 47, pp. 711–712 (1906)
Coale's parenthesized question marks make her opinion of the sing-song clear.
But as the sing-song began to wane, the term also began to be used without apparent negative connotations. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it often appears as a sentimental term expressing nostalgia for disappearing Quaker ways:
Where is gone the dignity that marked the "Friends' Meetings" of other days? The thoughtful silence, the long patience, the gentleness, the solemnity, the pauses? …No matter what was said or done, there was refreshment in what was left undone and unsaid; the speeches might be dull, but the silence worked conviction. The Spirit might not seem effectual when it moved, but it was heavenly when it restrained. Does it restrain now? Not a bit of it… In the older speakers, together with some of the Quaker sing-song, there linger something of the old Quaker simplicity. …More often [younger speakers] stand up, eager and unabashed, to "testify," without an apparent struggle.
—T.W.H., "Quaker Revivals", The Index, vol. 4, no. 185, p. 272 (1873)
Nowadays, it seems to me, Friends mostly take "sing-song" as a completely neutral name for this bygone practice, devoid of any derogatory overtones.
If the specific word sing-song did not come into use among Friends until the 19th century, when did the actual practice of intoned preaching begin? Certainly much earlier, but the few statements I can find by historians are rather vague: "In the 18th century" (Ben Pink Dandelion, The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction), "By the nineteenth century" (Thomas Hamm, The Transformation of American Quakerism).
The earliest explicit reference to Quaker chanting I have found is in a 1736 French book surveying religions of the world:
But the spirit does not always dictate sermons, or exhortations: sometimes it inspires prayers to the Quakers, other times it inspires them to chant. During the discourse, the prayer, or the exhortation of the faithful one whom the spirit has seized, the other faithful pray silently, examine themselves, sighing, apply to themselves what they hear, also become restless in interior combat of the spirit against the passions, & the efforts that Satan, they say, makes only too often to remain in them. It is during these agitations, and these combats, that a trembling takes the faithful one: and it has even happened, Croesius tells us (a) that the trembling was so universal in the assembly that one would have said there was an earthquake in the place, where they were assembled. It still happens, & even (b) more than one time, that the assembly disperses without anyone there having preached or exhorted, but then they do not pray inwardly any less. I have spoken of the singing of these Quakers, but one must not imagine that it resembles ours. It is a kind of buzzing, worthy of the spiritual slumber of the sect.
—Bernard Picard, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, vol. 4, p. 132 (my translation)
One cannot say with certainty, of course, that the chanting described here was the same as the sing-song of the 19th century, but it seems quite likely that chanted ministry was in continuous use in the interval, and that 19th century sing-song developed by stages from the kind of chanting described by Picard.
Lasersohn is a member of Ubana-Champaign Friends Meeting and professor emeritus of linguistics at Univesity of Illinois. His article is used by permisson of the author.