Inside front cover "easy reference for new singers' for loaner books..

[Baltimore Shape Note Singing]

I made a design to print out on sticker paper to place on the inside front cover of our Denson loaner books. They feature a few “quick reference” items, including a quick overview of the shape notes, the hollow square, the four parts of the tune. There is a list of helpful links and, most useful, a short list of some relatively easy and popular tunes to call for folks who are completely new to singing.

Someone on facebook asked me if there was a way to download it, but since it had Baltimore specific information, I made a "universal" revision and uploaded it to our blog:

https://www.baltimoreshapenote.org/2024/02/27/our-new-loaner-books/

Photos of the books and a download of the PDF is available.

We used them last night for the first time and a few first-time singers availed themselves of the list, which was very gratifying. My experience (though limited) has been that new people calling a song out at random often gets a song the group isn't that familiar with, and so it's not a good assured singing, and so people feel they "made a bad choice" and that's awkward, or just "bad feedback" for someone who maybe nervous about all the new stuff in the first place.  

I'm going to do one for the Shenandoah Harmony book that we also sing from.

Kevin Isaac