Rise Up Singing
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| Author | Peter Blood and Annie Patterson (eds) |
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| Country | US |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Folk, popular music |
| Genre | fake book |
| Publisher | Sing Out! Corporation |
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Publication date
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1988 |
| Pages | 288 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 26641560 |
Rise Up Singing is a popular group singing songbook conceived, developed, and edited by Annie Patterson and Peter Blood. It is the best-selling popular folk music collection in the United States and Canada, having sold over a million copies. since being published in 1988. Rise Up Singing contains words, chords, and sources to 1200 songs. Although the book is weighted towards folk music, it includes a wide variety of song genres including gospel, popular music, and Broadway show tunes that work well in sing-along settings. A sequel called Rise Again Songbook was released in 2015, containing lyrics and chords to 1200 more songs. The book is very popular.
Rise Up Singing’s creators, Annie Patterson and Peter Blood, both grew up in musical families that sang together regularly around the piano and campfires. Both led singing at camps and church youth groups and longed for a songbook containing large numbers of songs popularized by the Folk Revival of the 1960s. Blood helped to produce a series of mimeographed collections of song lyrics for use in sing-along settings where he was leading singing beginning in the early 1960s. These eventually grew into a songbook called Winds of the People (named for a song by Victor Jara), utilizing the same basic format that would later be used in Rise Up Singing. The book was published informally in 1979 with active help by activists involved in the Movement for a New Society. The book developed a large word-of-mouth following selling over 35,000 copies out of people’s homes.
Blood and Patterson collaborated to create Rise Up Singing, which was published by Sing Out! Magazine in 1988. No one anticipated that this new songbook would sell hundreds of thousands of copies virtually without formal promotion or advertising.
Rise Up Singing contains no notation except for rounds. Songs are laid out in a compact format allowing for three or more songs on each page. As a result, 1200 songs are able to fit in a compact and inexpensive songbook. Songs are arranged alphabetically in chapters that are grouped by subject matter or song genre, making it easy to find songs without reference to the indices. The book is indexed by title, artist, culture/language, holidays, and musical shows.
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