Back in March 2020, the week schools closed and businesses shut down and group activities suddenly stopped, two dozen neighbors in the village of Montague Center ambled down to our town common where -- standing at great distance from one another -- we took inspiration from social media videos of Italians singing on their balconies. We sought connection, stability, and hope, while balancing these with the safety of being outdoors and spread very far apart, and for an hour we sang together. We weren't some pre-existing choral group with a leader: we were just a bunch of folks living together in a small New England village, singing some widely-known folk songs and "old standards" we all more-or-less knew.

With zero intention of creating some sort of recurring event, and no structure or group leader, several of us showed up again at the same time the next day -- despite the pouring rain. (We had nothing else to do that week!) The next day, in sunshine, more of us did it again. Then one of us created this website, just so we could easily share (without paper) lyrics for the songs we sang that week, since other neighbors had started showing up and it was starting to look like societal isolation might continue for a while.

Then we kept showing up ... and more songs were introduced ... and we kept showing up ... spring into summer into autumn.... We had a motley crew of elementary school music teachers, shape note singers, Gilbert & Sullivan enthusiasts, bilingual music educators, hospice choir members, folklorists, morris dancing pub singers, and folks who had sung in various local folk chorales. We also had folks who had just grown up to the music of the sixties ... or seventies, eighties, nineties, aughts, teens, or twenties! ... and didn't necessarily think of themselves as "singers". We were tied together only by place and community and led only by ourselves.

And we kept showing up, always outdoors, through the winter and beyond, a community standing strong and together through January blizzards, spring thunderstorms, scorching August days, and everything in between.

Our website grew and we added organizing resources including what we'd learned about singing safely during the pandemic and songs that worked well for outdoor communities, in hopes some other communities might be inspired to try this. (Note: these resources are all nearly four years old at this point and not updated. They may be more interesting as an historic record of "life during early Covid" than as practical advice, now.)

Conditions gradually improved, vaccines became available, and in-person work and group activities resumed. But by that point, we had become so much more than a pandemic support group and our daily singing had become part of the fabric of our village.

At this writing (January 2024), there has been singing outdoors on the town common in Montague Center for over 1,400 days in a row. Not "every Tuesday", not "weekends" or "weekdays". Every. Day. (With at least two singers every day, but most often more like six to sixteen singers, various overlapping sets of folks every day from a more-or-less-regular crew of dozens, plus newcomers and visitors and friends.) We can't help but wonder if this has ever happened anywhere else, nor can we stop marveling at how fortunate we are to live here together. (Occasionally, our singing has been documented by graduate students, written about in newspapers, and even featured on PBS!)

As we near our four-year-anniversary (18 March 2024), we've sung thousands of different songs by now. The list to the left is but a fraction of them, now only occasionally updated with particular new favorites or with songs adapted to commemorate community milestones like singing for 500 (or 1,000) days or surviving the year 2020 or our resilient village May Day celebration. Lots of us sing many songs from memory, but many folks read lyrics on their phones, and some new-to-us songs are taught by ear while others are passed around on paper handouts; we don't have any rules.

In our second summer we discovered the songs of Sarina Partridge and Heartwood Trio, whose songwriting is a natural fit for our community. Sarina expresses our ethos perfectly on her website: Singing is the language of grief and praise, wonder and wisdom; we sing the world we want to inhabit, and we sing to understand the world we live in now.

What started as a close-knit group to hold our community together while also prioritizing public health and safety now welcomes visitors from near and far. We've welcomed friends, family, strangers, and some of our favorite songwriting heros, and we'll welcome you any day at 2:00 PM on the Montague Town Common.

Town Common Songs