Over on Mastodon (yes you should be there), Aus­tralian Friend Evan start­ed an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about Quak­er sing song. This is a form of deliv­er­ing min­istry that seems to date back to the begin­nings of our reli­gious soci­ety but which bare­ly exists any­more. To my untrained ears it sounds more like some­thing you’d hear in a small Catholic or Ortho­dox church. Many years ago Haver­ford Col­lege Library excerpt­ed a field record­ing on a page ded­i­cat­ed to Music and the Ear­ly Quak­ers:

Evan posts to a pas­sage on it from nineteenth-century Quak­er chron­i­cler Thomas Clark­son:

The Quak­ers, on the oth­er hand, nei­ther pre­pare their dis­cours­es, nor vary their voic­es pur­pose­ly accord­ing to the rules of art. The tone which comes out, and which appears dis­agree­able to those who are not used to it, is nev­er­the­less not unnat­ur­al. It is rather the mode of speak­ing which na- ture impos­es in any vio­lent exer­tion of the voice, to save the lungs. Hence per­sons who have their wares to cry, and this almost every oth­er minute in the streets, are oblig­ed to adopt a tone. Hence per­sons, with dis­or­dered lungs, can sing words with more ease to them­selves than they can utter th6m with a sim­i­lar pitch of the voice. Hence Quaker- women, when they preach, have gen­er­al­ly more of this tone than the Quaker-men, for the lungs of the female are gen­er­al­ly weak­er than those of the oth­er
sex.

I’ve always won­dered if lat­er oppo­si­tion to sing song might have been par­tial­ly moti­vat­ed by the fact that it was favored by women or sound­ed a bit too Catholic for Angli­cans like Clark­son or Quak­ers lean­ing that direction.

There’s a great 2011 post from the now-dormant Quak­er His­tor­i­cal Lex­i­con blog by Illi­nois Friend Peter Laser­sohn. The com­ments are also great.