The first booklets of music in my life, at least those I remember, go back to the late 1940s. But the first booklet of music that I put together myself in order to run singalongs was in the late 1960s. From about 1948 to 2008, a period of some 60 years, I was involved in singalongs in one form or another. In the last ten years, 1998 to 2008, though, singalongs using booklets of songs I or others created took place, for the most part, at the Ainslie House in George Town with residents of a seniors home. In the Baha’i community singalongs became rare events in my last years in Perth and in the first decade that I lived in Tasmania--nearly non-existent occasions. In some ways it was fitting that the last six years of singalongs in my life, 2002-2008, involved mostly senior citizens here in George Town using large-print songbooks published in the UK. I say “fitting” because the content was mainly for a generation born before WW2--in the first four decades of the twentieth century—the earliest years of Baha’i activity in Australia and Canada the religion I have been associated with for more than 50 years.

There is material in these two volumes, two 2-ring binders, for all age groups, although there are very few songs that originated in the period from about 1978 to 2008. The group born in the years after about 1970 will find few songs that were popular in their years in these two binders. I did not listen enough to the music of that generation to be familiar with it and, when I was familiar with the songs, as was the case with the songs of groups like Abba, I never bought the sheet music or learned how to play the songs in some other way. So it was that I did not know the songs of a whole generation well enough to sing them in groups informally in the Baha’i community and in any other communities of which I was a part as a teacher in primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions.

These resources here in these booklets, these files, this collection, are here for singalongs in the groups I am involved with as I head into the middle years of late adulthood, 65 to 75 and, finally, old age, 80++. I have multiple copies of what I have come to call the music of other interest groups for those not familiar with the Baha’i musical experience, booklets of songs I put together for students in classrooms where I used to teach as well as other groups. I have many editions of song books in multiple copy form that I made for Baha’i groups, as I say, as far back as the late 1980s. Songbooks from the previous two decades, the years 1968 to 1988, have all been lost or thrown away.

These musical experiences called singalongs have returned to my life here in George Town. In July 2008 I put together a package/booklet of 75 songs. Who knows when and who knows where and how these singalongs will develop in these years of late adulthood. My wife and son became a little tired of hearing the same old stuff back in the 1980s and 1990s; singing in groups seemed to become passe, perhaps even seen as declasse or lower in social status/standing in the wider society. This form of self-entertainment is far from dead, though, and I feel it will be part of my life in these years before my demise, my passing from this mortal coil.

In some ways it has been fitting that most of the singalongs I have been part of in the last ten years, 1998 to 2008, involved residents of a home for residents of an aged care facility on their last legs. I often thought that American writer William Faulkner's spirit may have been present in those sing alongs. I thought, as I led these old folks in song, that the spirit he had when he wrote his now famous book "As I Lay Dieing" may just be at the back of the leisure-social-room where we had our singalongs. For these people all lay, sat up or palely loitered about, dieing slowly. Each month that I went back to this old folks home during these latter years of these singalongs someone else had died or was on the edge. The term ‘old folks home’ was what we used to call these places for the old and dieing when I was a kid.

The resources in my personally prepared, tenderly fostered, oft-used-and-repeated booklets of material that are here in my files, my collections—were often kept tightly sealed with a big rubber-band for a future time when singalongs would return to my life and to the groups I was involved with in these years of my late adulthood and what would become, finally, old age. Old age begins, say some human development psychologists, at the age of 80. I've come to like that model since the 1990s sometime for it has given me, now in 2008, another 16 years before I'm actually, officially, or shall I say psychologically, old. And I have plenty of years left for singalongs.

Ron Price
3 July 2008
(Updated for Poetry in Colour
Forum: 15/7/08)