(This is a short remembrance I wrote for the 50th Anniversary of Spring Sing in the Spring of 2007.)
I should begin this tale with “Once upon a time,” for who could ever have dreamed up the extraordinary places, remarkable characters, and enduring memories that make up Spring Sing? Just think of all the wonderful venues we’ve visited and the amazing people we’ve had the privilege of knowing over the years.
I entered the story somewhere in the middle, around 1977—a mere one year older than Spring Sing itself. Fresh out of college, I watched my fledgling association with the Augmented Eight take on a new dimension as I anxiously prepared for my first Spring Sing in Greenwich. In the weeks leading up to that first Saturday performance, our director, one Wat Stewart, painstakingly drilled the bass parts into my head.
I remember standing on the lawn of the Riverside Yacht Club on a bright, breezy day, overlooking Long Island Sound and tossing a Frisbee with Tom and Scott Herrick, whose rare genetic blend accounted for half of my new favorite group, the Arbors. Among the many people gathered on the lawn was a very young and very beautiful—did I mention very young and very beautiful?—girl with long, long, long blonde hair. Her name was Libby, and she was the daughter of a Grunyon, Woody Geist. I actually met Libby’s mother, Rosemary, first—a woman too beautiful and too kind to be of this world.
Several years, several Spring Sings, and 15 round trips on the Ohio Turnpike later, I invited Libby to accompany me to the wedding of my new best friend, Jack Winder, a stand-up bass in the Augmented Eight. I planned to propose that weekend. In the spring of 1981, Woody announced our engagement from the stage of Princeton’s Alexander Hall to more than 500 Spring Singers, who serenaded us as Wally Collins conducted his arrangement of “I Found Love.”
Spring Sing 51 in Washington will be my 31st—and my last as executive director of the newly formed American A Cappella Alliance, Inc. When I stopped singing with the Augmented Eight in 1992, I invented a secretarial position for myself so I could remain involved with Spring Sing, but mainly so I could repay a debt of gratitude to everyone who conceived and nurtured this remarkable gathering—a gathering that has brought so much to so many. Fred Farran of the Arbors said it best in 1968, when the group nervously made its first appearance in Detroit: “There is nothing else like Spring Sing in the world.”
My hope for the next 50 years—for the individual groups and for the organization—is that we understand and appreciate what we are, but, more important, what we are not. In the fast-growing world of a cappella music, harmony sweepstakes, and a cappella summits, we remain a rare community—a family, even—devoted to sharing the reciprocal joys of listening and performing, our spirits joined through song.
With hearts full of spring and a lifetime of Spring Sing memories, it is my hope that love will continue to keep us together.