Like many people in the early months of the pandemic, I was terrified of civilizational collapse and bewildered by the U.S. government’s inept response to large-scale suffering. Also like many, I lost my job and fought with close friends. I fantasized about the end of the pandemic, foolishly imagining that there would be a hard stop inside of a few months when everything would go back to normal. I yearned to hug people again, to get drunk and go dancing, and to shout over loud music in crowded bars. I wanted my whole life back. But most of all, I wanted to sing with my choir.

Unfortunately, indoor choral singing was probably the single most dangerous artistic activity during the pandemic’s early lockdown phase. Since singers must stand close together while essentially spitting at each other, choral rehearsals were known to be some of the worst superspreader events. At a choir rehearsal in Mount Vernon, Washington, in March of 2020, 53 of the 61 people present became infected, three were hospitalized, and two died from COVID-19. 

Choral singing is also completely untransferable to a virtual format. Online lag time makes it impossible for musicians to be in sync with each other in real time on Zoom. You can instead create a facsimile of the real thing with singers recording themselves privately and a sound engineer painstakingly mixing the voices together so that they appear to be singing together. The effect is interesting, and the sound quality can be excellent, but for the singers themselves it’s not the real thing. That’s because the real thing isn’t just about the music you make but the act itself, joining your voices together in joyous collective song.

My choir took all the right precautions in the pandemic. We canceled rehearsals and appearances, went online, and made virtual choir videos. I hated every minute of it. I hated the flattening of the human experience to my narrow MacBook screen. I hated the forced autocracy of Zoom rehearsals, where I dutifully followed the song leader and muted my microphone to sing lower harmony to my bedroom walls. I hated most of all how the virtual rehearsals felt like an empty husk in comparison with the real thing. Whereas once the idea of a choir rehearsal could get me out of bed in the morning, in the spring of 2020 their virtual equivalent became just another obligatory Zoom call.

This state of affairs was why I found myself, in August of 2020, cycling in 90-degree heat across Brooklyn to a rooftop garden where my choir was to have its first masked, socially distanced rehearsal. The world was allowed to open up a crack, and outdoor gatherings, even choral gatherings, were permitted, so long as people stayed masked. We stood feet apart, singing while sucking in the cloth of our face masks, our sound muffled by the rush of traffic in downtown Brooklyn. Even under these conditions, I was happier than I’d been since the start of the pandemic.

My choir is Sing in Solidarity, the choir of the New York City Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The songs we sing are socialist, anarchist, communist, and anti-fascist, and we call each other comrade, mostly unironically. In the videos I took of our first rooftop rehearsal, choir members—actual grownups with jobs and bills to pay who were suffering under a criminally negligent government during a pandemic—were jumping up and down for joy.

Throughout the unseasonably warm fall of 2020, we returned repeatedly to the rooftop to sing. As the sun set, after rehearsals ended, we’d go on food and beer runs, and rehearsals turned into parties. A summertime party on a roof garden in New York City, with 20 or so singing socialists who had had little contact with other people in months, had a particular flavor to it. We were a little like sailors on shore leave, at least insofar as the singing went. The music certainly didn’t stop when rehearsals ended, and we would croon for hours, deep into the night.

Up on the rooftop in the fall of 2020, we sang Spanish Republican songs, Chilean Nueva Canción, Greek anti-fascist songs, and old American labor songs made popular by folk music legends like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie in the 1940s. We’d run through entire songbooks and break out our phones to look up lyrics and chords to contemporary songs we’d only ever heard in recorded versions. We’d sing in multiple languages, in multiple genres. Some songs were solos, some we’d sing collectively; most were a mix of both. People who couldn’t read music and who struggled to be heard during a formal rehearsal would lead songs and improvise harmonies. Mild intoxication had something to do with all this newfound confidence, but more important than the drinking was the powerful feeling of safety that collective singing provided. Unlike in a karaoke room, where inexperienced voices are immediately detected and found hilariously wanting in comparison with the recorded original, when we sing together, we are stronger and more beautiful. At a sing-along, if you have a voice, you can join in without embarrassment.

The word “hootenanny” probably went into usage in the 1920s as a nonsense word, used when someone couldn’t remember the name for something—the equivalent of “thingamajig” and “doohickey.” It came into popular use in the 1940s as a term for an informal musical gathering, at least partially because it was what Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and other Communist Party-adjacent musicians called their renowned singing parties in Greenwich Village.

These Greenwich Village hootenannies placed an emphasis on participation. You came to make your contribution, to lend your voice or your instrument to the proceedings, whatever your ability. In her book “My Song is My Weapon”: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-50, American Studies professor Robbie Lieberman describes these folk sessions. “The live, spontaneous music at a hootenanny contrasted with the trend toward professional recorded music. People came together to enjoy a collective experience, as opposed to individually ‘consuming’ the music in the privacy of their own homes,” she writes. 

Seeger and the other folk music revivalists from the mid-20th century were rowing against the current of music production in their era: a detachment and professionalization that has only increased in the decades since. These days, song circles are generally left to small children, to mommy-and-me music enrichment classes where a song leader instructs toddlers in the finer points of clapping and counting. Today, sing-alongs have mostly bad connotations in popular culture. We know to start groaning at the part of a movie where an overconfident white guy takes out his guitar and breaks into a ditty dripping in unctuous sincerity. Join in on the chorus? Absolutely not.

Today, folk music sing-alongs are a dying practice. They have this in common with almost all forms of amateur secular music. Outside of a church or karaoke room, singing is mostly left to the professionals. There is the musician and the listener, and a widening gulf between them. We can certainly fault the invention of recorded music in the 19th century for this separation, although the distancing can be traced back before the invention of recording instruments. The communist composer Hanns Eisler faulted the industrial revolution itself and the transformation it made in the material conditions of work for the death of community music. In his speech to the Choir of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in 1938, he asked:

What did the Industrial Revolution do to music culture? It destroyed most of the old folk music. The explanation is simple. Factory workers cannot sing at work in the same way and for the same reasons as the Volga boatmen sang. The tempo and rhythm of their work is dictated by their machines and not by the workers themselves. Spontaneous music culture dies under such conditions.

Far from the niche hobby it is today, singing was once a tool in our everyday lives. Collective singing once gave strength, speed, and wellness to laborers as they worked as one body to pick crops, mend fishing nets, or dye wool. The Volga boatmen Eisler refers to worked as a team along the shores of the Volga River in Russia, pulling cargo-hauling sailing ships in the opposite direction to the current. They had been doing this work since the 16th century. It was grueling manual labor, not to be romanticized; however, Eisler argues that the material conditions of this work allowed the boatmen to sing, and this singing helped them keep up the pace of their labor.

You might be familiar with this genre of song from the African American singing tradition, a genre that partly originated in the work songs and field calls of the enslaved or imprisoned. These songs helped maintain the pace of the work and offered occasions for protest or even resistance: telling stories of the enslaved defying authority, outwitting slavers, and even freeing themselves. Work songs, in this instance especially, allowed the singers to preserve a feeling of their own humanity while living under a system of violence and oppression. 

Whatever their application centuries ago, today work songs, like most fully organic folk songs, aren’t likely to make a comeback. It’s hard to imagine singing while we work our 21st century jobs under neoliberal capitalism, except possibly as an exercise in the absurd. The accountants in the 1983 film Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life transform into pirates, turning their office building into a sailing ship and taking off singing “The Accountancy Shanty.” The writers here knew that the idea of an accountant or any kind of white-collar worker singing and dancing a jig in the office would come off as ridiculous. 

Similarly, employees in an Amazon warehouse or a box store or chain restaurant do not have working conditions that allow them to sing while they work. A warehouse or distribution center is typically so noisy that workers must wear noise-canceling headphones to preserve their hearing. Collective singing would probably also get shut down in a service environment since it would disrupt the flow of work. In fact, we’d be hard pressed to find much collective on-the-job song-making in any quarter of the contemporary landscape for workers. Uber drivers and GrubHub delivery workers could probably entertain themselves singing solo while waiting in traffic, but they could hardly sing collectively. 

Capitalism killed folk music, in the same way it has destroyed—and continues to destroy—so much of what makes life beautiful. Why, then, did communists like Pete Seeger in the mid-20th century attempt to revive it? Why did the Soviet Union elevate folk music, transforming commonplace folk songs like the "Song of the Volga Boatmen" into militant anthems? What possible use could this dying art form serve in organizing a revolutionary working class?

In “My Song is My Weapon,” Lieberman quotes Seeger’s book The Incompleat Folk Singer, in which he describes collective music-making as a societally transformative act. “Ultimately, rank-and-file participation in music goes hand-in-hand with creativity in other planes—arts, sciences, and yes, even politics,” Seeger writes. He draws a parallel here between creative agency and mass collective action. In both music and politics, by adding one voice to many we can become stronger, more confident, and more effective. Being able to sing competently in public is a skill that almost everybody can develop. It has this in common with most skills involved in left-wing organizing. You don’t need a lot of special training to sing a folk song or to help organize your workplace; you just need a little practice and the expectation that your contribution matters.

Lieberman describes hootenannies as challenging “the conception of culture as passive entertainment separate from the rest of life.” One thing I love about them is how easily they weave music in with everyday reality. At the best hootenannies that I’ve been to, singing is integrated into conversation, eating and drinking, hijinks, and the sharing of memes and TikToks. While music might be front and center, it’s not even always the star. Lieberman cites a manual that Seeger’s left-wing music organization, People’s Songs, put out, called How to Plan a Hootenanny. It recommends not only singing, but also dancing, poetry, storytelling, and skits.

One of the last outdoor Sing in Solidarity rehearsals of 2020 took place the day the general election was called for Joe Biden. After the results were announced, New York City turned into a giant, teeming block party. That day also happened to be the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and some choir members brought huge bouquets of red carnations to rehearsal to mark the occasion. We sat singing on the roof, red carnations twirled in our hair, while below us the streets of Brooklyn swarmed in crowds giddily celebrating the ousting of Donald Trump. 

After the usual six or seven hours of singing, I biked home, my facemask plastered to my cheek with sweat, stopping on occasion to watch the dancing revelers. I genuinely wanted to be happy for them. I wished I felt the same relief that they did. I wished I was as confident as they were that the bad times would be over soon and that we’d seen the last of Trump. Lacking that assurance, I was glad that I had a community of collective music-making to hang onto for the catastrophes yet to come.