The Retreat Singers, a religious folk group formed through Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Little Rock in the mid-1960s, are preparing for their forthcoming performance Sunday at the church.
The group has held weekly gatherings since November with members practicing piecemeal, tuning up and testing instruments and voices, but members are understandably nervous about their 4 p.m. performance on Palm Sunday.
That's because it will mark the first time in 45 years the group will perform its entire program about the life of Christ in front of an audience.
"You didn't have to join Trinity to join the Retreat Singers," said Ida Darragh, one of the group's original members. "You just showed up, which is what made it so welcoming."
Darragh joined the group in 1965 after attending a Christmas party with a friend who had told her about the gatherings.
"It was special, it was a society," said Bill Worthen, a Retreat Singer whose mother wrote a book on the history of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. "It took in people who didn't have a place elsewhere."
The Retreat Singers developed their sound under the guidance of the Rev. Edgar Shippey, a newly appointed youth group leader and assistant to Dean Charles Higgins.
Folk music was popular at the time, Worthen said, and the group formed on the heels of the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary. The program began and ended with Hebrew folk songs, in keeping with Shippey's background in Jewish folk music, and the group wrote readings that led into each song.
Choosing to name itself after retreats the youth group had taken along the Buffalo River, the Retreat Singers debuted with eight members to perform their program, A Folk Song Life of Christ, at the church on Palm Sunday in 1966.
The group began to grow through word of mouth and took to the road on a bus dubbed the Holy Roller, which eventually would be joined by a second bus dubbed the Exobus. The group began touring throughout Arkansas and parts of Oklahoma on weekends. Members came from five high schools in the Little Rock and North Little Rock area (with one member from Pine Bluff), needing at first to wear name tags so they could remember one another's names.
"We met every Sunday afternoon at the church and practiced our program, and that's how new people would learn it," said Becky Boyd Newberry, who joined the group in 1967. "People would take up the guitar who had never played before, and you did that during the practices until you were ready to take part in a performance."
Newberry said the group would sing and perform manual labor for room, board and food in the places they stayed, and performed for offerings to and from their destinations. Projects ranged from repainting an Arkansas church's camp areas to building a school on a Navajo reservation in Utah.
Darragh, Worthen and Newberry agreed that Shippey had been the catalyst that helped propel the group to its success.
"He was a very charismatic person," Newberry said. "He cared about the people in the group. He could relate well to young people ... and I think that was kind of rare. And he loved the touring. He didn't actually perform with us, but he gave our intro when we came in, and then he would go to the back and watch us and be able to give us pointers."
Shippey also served as coordinator for the group and managed the details of the group's trips, setting itineraries and making arrangements with clergy members at the various churches where the group would stay while on the road.
In June 1966, the Retreat Singers performed for the first time at Washington National Cathedral in Washington, an experience in sound that Newberry described as "acoustic nirvana." The group would be invited back to perform two more times at the cathedral, in 1967 and 1968.
After that first performance in Washington, the group traveled north to Canada, where they worked alongside Cree Indians to install a church furnace and teach summer school for 400 children.
In October 1966, the singers were featured in a story about religious music groups of the time in Life magazine, titled "Show Biz in Church: Drama, Jazz and Modern Dance Snap Congregations to Attention."
The group also released its first album, A Folk Song Life of Christ, in 1966. Arkansas artist Edwin Brewer created the cover art for the album, which was recorded at E&M Recording Co. studio on Markham Street in Little Rock. The group's 1968 double album, The Retreat Singers In Stereo, was the group's second release.
The Retreat Singers's longest trip was an eight-week European tour in the summer of 1968. Destinations included Scotland, England, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The Archbishop of Canterbury invited the group to sing at the decennial Lambeth Conference, a gathering for Anglican bishops, in London. The group stood directly in front of Sweden's King Gustaf VI, who was hard of hearing, for another performance.
The Retreat Singers made indelible impressions at home and abroad with their music, which featured adaptations of "Jesus Loves Me" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The group wrote the rest of the program's songs, such as "I Can See," and a somber, melodic song about the birth of Christ, "Virgin Mary Had a One Son."
Newberry described the music as "a living, breathing thing."
"It wasn't like a choir singing specific hymns," she said. "It was something that came from the group, and that the group gave to each individual."
Audiences' responses gave back to the singers in kind.
"We kind of expected it to just be roads and not very meaningful, but the audiences we had were all different because the churches where we sang were different, and we would feed off that audience," she said. "It kept [the performances] alive for us, which in turn made it more alive for the people at the performances."
The Retreat Singers spent the most time -- six weeks -- during their 1968 summer tour in Wales, where the group's mission project was to help renovate Dolserau Hall in Dolgellau into a home for senior citizens. The group stayed in a remote area, Darragh said, but the residents were very welcoming.
"We had no hot water in our house, so local people were kind enough to let us visit so we could take a bath," she said. "On the Fourth of July they wanted to have a traditional Fourth of July for us, but I think they served turkey and dressing."
Newberry said singing in Liverpool Cathedral and Lambeth Place was an eye-opening experience that introduced her to different cultures.
"I still have a place in my heart that belongs to Wales because that was such a momentous thing," she said. "I've been back to Wales 11 times, just because a part of my heart is there."
Wales was also the place that brought the Retreat Singers face-to-face with a new sense of responsibility: serving as ambassadors for Arkansas.
"Little Rock had a reputation," Worthen said. "We went into a pub in Wales and somebody said, 'We can tell by your accent you're not from around here.' We said, 'Well, we're from Arkansas,' and they said, 'Isn't that where the integration crisis started in the United States?'"
Sometimes that was the only way people knew where the group was from, Darragh said, because there were no cable news networks where people could get a daily dose of international news.
"And that's another thing that helped us grow up so quickly," Newberry added. "We realized we had to act as representatives of our state, our city, our country."
Retreat Singers would be sent home if they did something that was considered out of bounds, but that didn't happen often.
"It could've happened more often because we were teenagers, but we all managed to hold it together so that we could keep what we valued about this," Darragh said.
Performing and traveling together forged lifelong bonds among group members. Twelve went on to marry others within the group, Worthen said. At least two members became professional singers.
As Retreat Singers grew older, graduating from high school and going on to other pursuits, younger siblings often joined the group in a sort of second generation.
While the group's members numbered more than 120 collectively between 1966 and 1972, Shippey's transfer to California in the summer of 1969 took a toll. The group continued, taking its last summer trip in 1971, but it was never the same.
"Once we grew up and moved on our way, there needed to be a core person at the cathedral who was the leader and the coordinator of the team, and that just didn't happen again," Darragh said.
Worthen noted that the cathedral moved some of the Retreat Singers to the diocese in an effort to enliven it in some way and try to broaden the mission beyond just the cathedral parish, but it didn't stick.
The group stuck around until March 1972, when it performed A Folk Song Life of Christ for an audience for the last time. Shortly thereafter, the church issued an official statement saying the group was disbanded.
Although the group held its first official reunion in 1983, it held many unofficial reunions before and after. A member passing through town or returning to visit family was reason to celebrate and reminisce.
The group's 2012 reunion resulted in setting up (almost) annual reunions, and the Retreat Singers ended up singing several of their songs at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in May.
"Their musical offering whet our appetites, and we wanted the whole thing," said J. Russell Snapp, sub dean at the church. "We wanted to experience what their audiences had experienced back in the late '60s and early '70s.
"It will be a great time for [the Retreat Singers] to enhance our entry into the spirit of walking with Christ and reliving, in a sense, his last week and his death and resurrection."
About 10 Retreat Singers still live in the Little Rock area, and approximately 30 are expected to perform together Sunday, with members coming from as far away as Maine, California, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Georgia and Virginia.
"We're very excited about it and hope a lot of people from beyond our own congregation come and experience this," Snapp said. "It's not like a service where people are actively participating. It's something you can receive."
Religion on 04/08/2017