AMEN! TO THE GOSPEL CHOIR
TELL ME, DARTMOUTH BRETHREN, WHAT DO YOU SAY WHEN ANIVY LEACUE CHOIR CAN SING, AND IMEAN SING, "AMAZING CRACE"?
THEIR "AMAZING GRACE" IS amazing. Their "King Jesus Is A-Listenin" would get anyone to listen. Their voices are the voice of the spirit, of unadulterated soul.
Whoa, hold on. Soul? In the Ivy League? An institution bred to croon "Boola Boola" and "Son of a Gun for Beer"?
You got it right, brothers and sisters. This is the Dartmouth College Gospel Choir, which seems blissfully unaware of being an Ivy oxymoron. Once a term, this 40-member group can be counted on to bring down the house at Rollins Chapel, and the CD is selling strong.
The choir has been around for 15 years, headed up by J.C. White, bishop of Turner's Faith Temple in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Undergraduates arrange and teach the songs, led by four student directors. "Gospel music voices the dependency of one on God," says co-director Simeon Anderson '97. "We come here expecting that there's going to be an exchange. For praise of God we get a positive feeling back."
And an Ivy campus gets a revivifying shot of soul.
SEPTEMBER 1975. I arrive for my Dartmouth freshman trip with the wrong sleeping gear, the wrong knapsack, and the wrong clothes. People notice me: I'm the short brunette in the blue Keds, carrying a bulging frameless backpack (designed for books, not hiking), dragging a 20-pound sleeping bag. As I saunter onto the lawn in front of Robinson Hall, I see lots of tall people on the lawn-sturdy Nordic types who look like they can outbreathe me, let alone outhike me. Still, I boldly join the Big People and hit the trail.
There are about eight of us. The one who stands out is a tall, willowy blonde with long, long legs. She doesn't climb, she floats. She glides effortlessly up the mountains, leaping from rock to rock, chatting all the while in a crisp, Chappaqua accent about gourmet cooking and her junior year in France. Her knapsack amazes me. It weighs nothing but has everything. She's got six changes of clothes, a poncho, a Speedo suit, and a suspiciously large bath towel. When it's
She wheezed upMoosilauke behind aleggy blonde, then brokeher High Holiday fast atPeter Christian's. But for aJewish girl at Dartmouthin the Seventies,
