Florida Sailor mentioned the beautiful Shaker song Simple Gifts. Earlier in the month, I posted a link to Sydney Carter's Lord of the Dance, which was inspired by the Shaker song. The Shakers were great music makers.

The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing were popularly known as the Shakers because of all that ecstatic dancing, which was sort of an odd thing, most people thought, for a bunch of celibate religious people to be doing. The Second Appearing stuff kind of bothered some people, too: Mancunian Mother Ann Lee, who led her tiny group from England in 1774 to found a spiritual colony in New York state, was supposed to be a new messiah. (This was 200 years before Leonard Cohen wrote Suzanne, and then some hippie made a terrible movie about it. . . )

For an illiterate founder, Ann Lee had a lot of esoteric ideas, like the emergence of the 'Christ Consciousness'. The Americans arrested her and some of her followers, because there was a war on and – at least in North America – people's civil rights tend to get violated during wars. In the new republic, the Shakers became more popular. After all, they were egalitarian (and abolitionist), hard-working, prosperous as farmers, sold seed packets by mail order, and made superior furniture. What wasn't to like?

Oh, and they invented things. Like the clothespin. Where would we be without the clothespin? Putting our wet laundry on the radiator, is where. They also invented the circular saw. And they didn't believe in patents: what they invented, they shared. Pretty cool.

Today, there are only a few Shakers left. They live in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, near Poland (where the bottled water comes from). Mother Ann predicted this. She said that the group would dwindle down to just a handful. . . and then, the movement would take over the world. So that's us told.

Shaker Hymns

You want to buy some Shaker furniture? Just google 'Shaker furniture'. You'll find lots, but it probably won't be as cheap as Ikea.

You want to sing some Shaker hymns? Or make up your own dance to them? Let's go.

• Simple Gifts, of course. The quintessential Shaker hymn. Aaron Copland stole it for his Appalachian Spring. Copland was clueless: he has a full orchestra play it loudly, slowly, and with amazing pomposity. Sometimes, composers are idiots. Content yourself with Yo-Yo Ma and Alison Krauss, both peerless musicians.
• Not One Sparrow is Forgotten. Echoing the Sermon on the Mount: according to Jesus, not one sparrow falls to the ground without God's caring about it.
• Sanctuary. Here, it's sung by a cantor in a synagogue. She has a great voice. Glad to see that shul is keeping up with the times.
• I'll call this song-and-dance Shake Shake. These people will give you an idea of how the dancing worked. Imagine a hundred people doing that, though.
• Here's someone explaining the Shaker approach to musical performativity. They weren't trying to land a recording contract. They were trying to build song bridges across the dimensional divide, I suspect. Which is what hymns originally meant to do. Yay, Shakers.

Here's a discussion of Shaker and non-Shaker tunes. It might explain a few things.

Now, we may think these people were pretty weird. But don't they brighten the world?