"In Yonder Valley"
Sung without accompaniment, this is the oldest surviving Shaker song with text. Father James, one of the small founding group who traveled with Allie Lee to Americal from Manchester, England, was a visionary and a powerful preacher. This version comes from a manuscript copied at Sabbath-day Lake in the mid-19th century by Elder Otis Sawyer (1815-1884), a composer and copyist of many Shaker musical manuscripts, circa 1880.
BNC: Vocal
In yonder valley there flows sweet union
Let us arise and drink our fill
The winter's passed and the spring appears
The turtle dove is in our land
In yonder valley there flows sweet union
Let us arise and drink our fill
I was on vacation in Maine and found a CD up on the shelf in the house I had rented. It was a compilation of Shaker hymns with a bit of history on each. I was very taken with this song, which was only the voice of one woman and no accompaniment. Her style of singing was unadorned as well. I found it quite challenging to keep my "ego" out of the middle of my performance. I kept going back to the idea of emptying out my need to "sing" the song and just leave space for the song itself to be presented. It makes for better singing in the case of any song really, to get out of the song's way.
THE SHAKERS
Shakerism was founded by an illiterate English factory worker named Ann Lee. Guided by divine visions and signs, she and eight pilgrims came to America in 1774 to spread her gospel in the New World.
Shaker sisters demonstrating dance positions.
Photo courtesy of Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA.
At their height in 1840 more than six thousand believers lived in nineteen communal villages from New England to Ohio and Kentucky. Tales of their peaceful and prosperous lives impressed the world's utopians. But Shaker aspirations were divine, not social or material. As millennialists, they were unified in the belief that Christ had come again, first in the person of Mother Ann and subsequently "in all in whom the Christ consciousness awakens." It was therefore the duty of each believer to live purely in "the kingdom come" and to strive for perfection in everything he or she did.
The Shakers were a religious sect who splintered from a Quaker community in the mid-1700's in Manchester, England. Known then derisively as "Shaking Quakers" because of the passionate shaking that would occur during their religious services, they were viewed as radicals, and their members were sometimes harassed and even imprisoned by the English. One of those imprisoned, Ann Lee, was named official leader of the church upon her release in 1772. Two years later, driven by her vision of a holy sanctuary in the New World, she led a small group of followers to the shores of America where they founded a colony in rural New York.
The Shakers were pacifists who kept a very low profile, and their membership increased only modestly during the decades following their arrival. At their peak in the 1830's, there were some 6,000 members in nineteen communities interspersed between Maine and Kentucky. Soon after the Civil War their membership declined dramatically. Their practice of intense simplicity and celibacy accounts for much of their decline.
Today there is only one active Shaker community remaining, the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine. They maintain a Shaker Library, a Shaker Museum, and a website.
The Shakers were known for their architecture, crafts, furniture, and perhaps most notably, their songs. Shaker songs were traditionally sung in unison without instrumental accompaniment. Singing and dancing were vital components of Shaker worship and everyday life. Over 8,000 songs in some 800 songbooks were created, most of them during the 1830's to 1860's in Shaker communities throughout New England.
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