Singing schools were once among the most popular wintertime activities in the rural Susquehanna Valley. They were not permanent schools or formal academies. Ordinarily, a traveling singing master contracted with a church, neighborhood, or group of subscribers to teach a course lasting several weeks or several months.

Classes were usually held at night in a church, academy, or one-room schoolhouse. Students learned how to read notes, keep time, sing scales, and perform hymns in several vocal parts. Just as importantly, the schools provided young people with an acceptable place to gather, socialize, and court.

The American singing-school movement originated in New England during the early eighteenth century. Congregational leaders were concerned that church music had deteriorated because tunes were being learned entirely by ear. Ministers and music teachers promoted what they called “regular singing”—singing according to written notes and musical rules—rather than the older practice of lining out a hymn and following the leader by memory.

During the late eighteenth century, itinerant New England singing masters carried the practice into Pennsylvania and other states.

No single organization appears to have established singing schools throughout the valley. They spread community by community through: Protestant congregations seeking better hymn singing; district schoolteachers who also knew music; itinerant “Yankee” singing masters; academies and seminaries; revival meetings, camp meetings, and Sunday schools.

The Valley’s Pennsylvania German congregations already possessed strong traditions of chorale and hymn singing. During the nineteenth century, German-language tune books increasingly incorporated teaching introductions and methods associated with the American singing-school movement. The resulting regional tradition was therefore probably a mixture of New England-style singing-school instruction and older Lutheran, Reformed, Moravian, and German sectarian music.

The Reverend David Jewett Waller, who began his Presbyterian ministry in Bloomsburg in 1838, reportedly organized a singing school there in 1839, along with a Bible class. This is one of the earliest specific dates found for a singing school in the immediate Middle Susquehanna region.

D. H. B. Brower’s 1881 history of Danville contains one of the best descriptions of the custom. “Music has long been liberally patronized in Danville. I pass over the good old times of the village "singing school," and this is a necessity, as but scanty record is left of those primary institutions when the "master" with his "pitchfork," nasal twang and swallow-tailed coat ruled the hour.

“Ah! those were delightful days and more delightful nights, when the young folks met at stated periods in the quaint and rugged schoolhouse of the village, each with the latest edition of fa-sol-la in one hand and a tallow-dip in the other, wrapped in a paper socket. Do re me had not been invented; gas was unknown, and coal oil slept in darkness far down in the earth. Yet the people were contented and happy with the square notes and the light the tallow afforded.

“It was in the days when caste, founded on wealth or accidental circumstances, was unknown, and when these humble enjoyments yielded a rich harvest of delight.”

The singing master might teach two or three evenings each week. Payment was usually collected by subscription, and the course often concluded with an exhibition, concert, or public singing. In isolated rural communities, the social side could rival the musical instruction. Evening classes gave young men and women a respectable reason to meet during winter, when farm work was less demanding. Walking partners home after class was an established part of singing-school courtship, vividly remembered in the Danville account.

John Wolverton Fryling, born in Sunbury in 1817, taught private school and singing school before becoming a merchant and businessman. His career illustrates how a singing master might be a locally educated individual rather than a full-time professional musician.

An especially valuable firsthand reference comes from the Civil War. In February 1865, George N. Aumiller of Dalmatia wrote home from the Petersburg front. Responding to news from his younger sister, Sarah, he encouraged her to continue attending singing school and to learn all she could because her teacher believed she would become a good singer. This confirms that singing schools were still an ordinary part of community life in rural Northumberland County during the Civil War.

Robert Dunbar, born in Columbia County in 1803, worked as a blacksmith and also taught ordinary school and singing school. He lived and worked near Milton, in Union County, and later in the Elimsport area. Dunbar’s biography demonstrates how singing masters traveled among neighboring communities and often combined music teaching with a trade or profession.

The Welsh composer Joseph Parry, who had lived and worked in Danville as a young man, returned to the borough from 1871 to 1873. During that period, he served as a church organist, gave concerts, and conducted a local singing school. Parry later became an internationally recognized composer and professor of music in Wales. His Danville school represents the more advanced and professional form that singing-school instruction had reached by the 1870s.

Between 1900 and 1915, the traditional itinerant winter singing school largely disappeared in central Pennsylvania, though occasional rural classes survived. The term increasingly appeared in nostalgic entertainment and “old-time” programs.

For perhaps sixty to eighty years, they served three purposes simultaneously: they trained congregations to read and sing music, provided rural communities with winter entertainment, and created one of the most important courtship settings available to young people.

They did not simply vanish. Their musical work passed into church choirs, public-school choruses, Sunday schools, revival singing, and the region’s numerous community musical organizations. Their social role was gradually replaced by literary societies, church youth groups, lodges, concerts, and other forms of organized recreation.