We now have a publisher – HammerOn Press – for our book: ‘Singing for our lives: Stories from the street choirs’. As you know, it’s about street choirs in the UK as a social movement and is based on around 40 oral history interviews with street choir members from the far north to ‘the beautiful south’, and east to west right across the country, and a cluster in the north of England, also the Midlands.
When it’s published, in the next year we hope, we’ll be looking for a serious ‘popular audience’ that might include academics, activists, choristers, musicians… There’s a marked connection between many of the street choirs and British socialism through the Clarion Movement, Workers Education Association, Big Flame and street bands, if that’s any indicator. Watch this space!
For a reminder of the project see http://www.singing4ourlives.net/ and http://www.redpepper.org.uk/raised-voices-the-campaigning-…/