I had a conversation with Hannah, one of our altos, who has been singing in a grindcore band up until recently, and now gets her music fix from Sacred Harp. We talked about how different people get drawn to the urban revival of Sacred Harp singing. There are the punk rockers. There are the people who love Renaissance and medieval music. There are the old folkies. There are even avant-garde sound artists. Of course there are the church musicians and the people who just like to sing in church. And there are the people who just like Sacred Harp for no particular reason.
We have all these types of people in the Berkeley weekly singing. Some of us fit into more than one category — I first ran into Sacred Harp while attending a folk festival looking for new music to sing with my church choir, so I fit into the church and folk categories. But I’ve also flirted with early music, and I was a punk rocker at one point in my life. It’s fun asking new people when they show up at a Sacred Harp singing — so, what brought you here?