The Gift to Be Simple

by Edward Deming Andrews

Features the songs, dances, rituals of American Shakers — only authoritative account. Origin, development, notation, dance figures. Includes 80 songs in notation, 17 illustrations.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

170 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1962

Reviews

[David Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Gift to be Simple: Songs, Dances, and Rituals of the American Shakers by Edward Deming Andrews (Dover Publications 1940) (783) (3815).

Here’s the necessary background to understand the Shakers. The Shakers were an extremely odd religious sect/cult who arose in the US in the later days of the eighteenth century. They were known as “The Shaking Quakers,” and they were dancin’ fools (no disrespect intended)! Their religious rituals incorporated song and dance into their meetings for purposes of entering “spiritual ecstasy."

However, libertines they were not. Shakers practiced strict celibacy, and the sexes were entirely segregated. Since the Shakers were celibate, the only way the group could grow was to recruit new members. And in fact, if a family joined the Shakers, the familial bonds shared among the nuclear family were dissolved or ignored. A family who joined the Shakers would find that they were completely and forevermore separated. The husband would live in the communal men’s house, the wife would go live in the women’s house, and any children would go live in the children’s quarters.

Can you imagine trying to explain to young children that they were leaving home and hearth to go live among strangers, that their mother and father were no longer their parents, and that their siblings were no longer their brothers and sisters? Brutal. And unthinkable.

Individual Shakers could not and did not own private property. This means of course that any (formerly) private property owned by new Shaker converts had to be turned over to the church community itself for disposition. The sect owned all property communally and exclusively.

For a time the Shakers were a successful community. The sect began to dwindle in size after the Civil War, and the group stopped accepting new members in the twentieth century. Since no children could be born into the community, the group stagnated, and the death of the sect was inevitable.

It sounds like a restrictive bunch, but the Shakers apparently knew how to party. They must have deeply loved the spiritual ecstasy that their religious fervor led them to experience, for the dancing, the songs, and the hymns of the Shaker seemed quite celebratory.

Author Edward Deming Andrews was one of the world’s foremost authorities on the lives, the practices, and the community of the Shakers. His book The Gift to be Simple: Songs, Dances and Rituals of the American Shakers is a trove of the songs, lyrics, and dances that were church dogma.

Weirdly enough, many of the lyrics that Andrews shares from the Shaker hymn books reminded me more than anything else of my old college fraternity songs and chants. Here is an example from an 1847 Shaker hymnal; the song is entitled “Drink Ye of Mother’s Wine” and is sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle:”

Drink ye of mother’s wine,

Drink, drink, drink ye freely.

Drink ye of mother’s wine,

It will make you limber.

If it makes you reel around,

If it makes you fall down,

If it lays you on the floor,

Rise and drink a little more.

Andrews tells us that though this is a drinking song, to the Shakers the song referred not to alcoholic intoxication but instead to the “gift of spiritual wine” as in “The Gift of spiritual wine carried a great evidence of its reality by the paroxysms of intoxication which it produced, causing those who drank it to stagger and reel like drunken people.” (The Gift to be Simple, (quoting Isaac N. Young MS), p. 124).

And oh! How the Shakers must have danced! Here’s what the author shares on the matter:

“Some spectators…contemptuously likened the dancing postures of the Shakers to those of kangaroos, “penguins in procession” or dancing dogs; and popular opinion…conceived the worship as ridiculous or grotesque. Yet there were many who found the movements graceful and appropriate, and the worshippers themselves truly inspired.”(quoting Gorrie, p.156).

The author shares diagrams of some of the ritual dance patterns employed by the Shakers in their religious meetings. The dancing apparently combined elements of twenty-first century country-western line dancing with the euphoric flailing of the dancing Deadheads at a Grateful Dead concert.

This makes me sorry that I never got to dance with the Shakers.

I purchased a used PB copy in acceptable condition from Amazon on 6/1/2010.

My rating: 7/10, finished 6/13/23 (3815).

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