There is a free event in an expensive city that might, if you enter it with the right spirit, restore a smidgen of your faith in this polarized death spiral of a country. (Clearly, I spend too much time on Twitter.) A few weeks back, some friends and I were in San Francisco for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival—also free—when, after an overpriced dinner, we wandered over to Hyde Street Pier to join that evening’s “Chantey Sing.”
Hosted by the National Park Service, the Chantey Sing takes place on the first Saturday of every month. The location is a docked ferry that once sailed between Oakland and San Francisco, before bridges crossed the Bay. Antique cars parked within its cabin, meant to send you back to the days of yore, greet you as you enter the vessel for a three-hour event that starts at 8pm.
We arrived around 9:15, during a break in the action, so I waited in a short line at a portable table, dropped a few dollars into a donation can, and was handed a cup of hot apple cider for myself, and three more for my companions. I wandered toward the vessel’s starboard side to search for my friends among the couple hundred chairs arranged for the evening.
After a few minutes, those I took to be the sing-along’s leaders walked in together and sat on a bench against the cabin wall to reconvene the festivities. One held a small accordion, another a banjo, another a guitar; two held no instruments at all. Before I knew what was happening, someone in the audience began to sing. He sung in a language I didn’t recognize. He sang at first without accompaniment but was soon joined by the crowd, who seemed to know, instinctively, to take up together each verse’s refrain. After a while I discerned that the language was Russian. The melody was hypnotic.
When the song was over, a man on the bench wearing park service garb—likely ranger Peter Kasin—announced that someone in the crowd was visiting from China, or at least knew a Chinese folk song, and could she please teach it to us? (As I was sitting in the back, the context and the conversation up front was often lost to me.) A woman in the second row of seats obliged, and within seconds the chorus of voices in the room were singing in a language few—perhaps only one—of us understood.
The day before, when my friend mentioned he had reserved spots for us to sing Irish songs with strangers, I imagined we’d be subjected to manic, theatrical hosts—a la those at Sing Sing!, the dueling piano bar—who’d harry embarrassed tourists into taking a verse of “The Irish Rover.” Instead of coerced cheerfulness, the mood was familial. We sat together as if in a chilly, cavernous, but inviting living room that rocked gently from time to time as passing boats sent their wakes pier-ward. When nobody in the audience volunteered a song, the instrumentalists would lead us in an old favorite. (An old favorite to these people. I’d never heard any of these tunes before.)
After the Chinese folk song, a young woman, sitting alone in a short row of otherwise empty chairs, told a story of a famous British shanty (in its alternative spelling) that is often taken for older than its roughly 60 years. After sharing a brief history of the song, the park ranger asked her, “Well, are you going to sing it for us?”
The woman laughed, sheepishly, and in a shaky but distinct voice, while glancing at the lyrics on her phone, she sang to us about a British warship sunk during World War I, or possibly World War II—I can’t be certain. What was certain is how the woman’s untrained voice cut through the air. The audience was silent as the woman’s voice rose and fell within the spacious cabin. When the time came, we collectively copied its notes, filling the air with the warmer, rounder sound of many voices singing the same melody, in many threads woven round and thus reinforcing a single, thin strand, the thread on which the whole cord depends.
A few songs in I became aware that about a third of the people were regulars. I was reminded of the folk nights at Linnaea’s Café, in San Luis Obispo, when I was in college. Once a month, a usual gang would meet in the main room at the back of the café. They would be strumming on their instruments the chords of Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie songs, welcoming anyone who cared to join in. I never joined. I sat in front, by the bar and the window that opened onto Garden Street, drinking my coffee and reading the alt weekly to pass the time. The sound the folksingers made rolled down the hallway, passing the counter and saturating my ears. The gatherings were more than filler for the café’s entertainment calendar. These people came each month for reasons too vulnerable or inchoate to admit or articulate. Or maybe it was just a fun thing to do.
In a place like San Francisco—where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $3,700 and a plate of tiny bratwursts on a bed of sauerkraut, with a beer, will run you $35 (as I learned mere minutes before heading to the Hyde Street Pier)—it’s a rare blessing to find anything for free. For the cost of getting yourself there, you’ll receive an assembled chorus that welcomes strangers, a cup of hot cider for a one-dollar donation, and an introduction to songs commemorating shipwrecks, battles and tragic love stories you’ve likely never heard of.
Is it cheesy? A little, yes, thankfully. And the lighting could be a little less bright. Yet to participate, I mean really participate, in a Chantey Sing requires earnestness, shamelessness, and a tiny bit of faith in the human community, a faith that will be enlarged when you leave the ferry and head back out into the cold, damp San Francisco night.
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When: The first Saturday of every month. For info, or to make reservations, go here.
