“Making the many-minded one”: Community Singing at the Peabody Prep in 1915

Extract

In 1915, an extraordinary sequence of events positioned Baltimore at the vanguard of the burgeoning community singing movement. As a reporter for the Evening Sun put it in April of that year, “It begins to appear that all Baltimore has wanted to burst forth in song for a very long time, and that the city has been waiting for just such an opportunity.”¹ The community concert that provoked this comment preceded a hurricane of similar offerings, which ranged from gatherings in public schools to sing-alongs with the City Park Band to outdoor celebrations with dancing and motion pictures. The community singing craze in Baltimore grew from the tireless labor of a pair of ambitious women who developed and carried out community singing activities at the Peabody Institute Preparatory Division (hereafter “the Prep”). There can be no doubt that May Garrettson Evans, superintendent of the Prep, and Henrietta Baker Low, director of the Prep’s singing classes for children, transformed their city and the nation by advancing the causes of music education and community music, and the time has come for their story to be told. Both the women’s activities and their subsequent erasure from the historical record, however, can only be understood in a critical context that assesses the roles of class, race, and gender in early twentieth-century American society. This article will consider Evans's and Low’s identities and ideologies as it examines their inauguration of Baltimore’s community singing movement.