Evan posts to a passage on it from nineteenth-century Quaker chronicler Thomas Clarkson:

The Quakers, on the other hand, neither prepare their discourses, nor vary their voices purposely according to the rules of art. The tone which comes out, and which appears disagreeable to those who are not used to it, is nevertheless not unnatural. It is rather the mode of speaking which nature imposes in any violent exertion of the voice, to save the lungs. Hence persons who have their wares to cry, and this almost every other minute in the streets, are obliged to adopt a tone. Hence persons, with disordered lungs, can sing words with more ease to themselves than they can utter th6m with a similar pitch of the voice. Hence Quaker-women, when they preach, have generally more of this tone than the Quaker-men, for the lungs of the female are generally weaker than those of the other
sex.

I’ve always wondered if later opposition to sing song might have been partially motivated by the fact that it was favored by women or sounded a bit too Catholic for Anglicans like Clarkson or Quakers leaning that direction.

There’s a great 2011 post from the now-dormant Quaker Historical Lexicon blog by Illinois Friend Peter Lasersohn. The comments are also great.

In my bedroom late at night in the early 80s, I explored the sounds inside my new radio. I would bury myself underneath my Star Trek sheets, pull the radio inside, and listen with volume barely perceptible. Three was no real reason for the secrecy. I’m sure my parents wouldn’t have particularly cared. But I was a private kid. I didn’t want to let on that I was curious about the adult world. Pop radio and MASH reruns were my secret.

I had had a shortwave radio in middle school and brought the thrill of long-distance discovery to my radio explorations. Geography and sound had more mystery in those days before the internet. On a cold, clear night, I could tune in AM powerhouses half a continent away.

One particularly cold night, one of these distant signals played a song I had never heard or even imagined. It was half-drowned out by static. The signal drifted in and out in waves but I listened mesmerized. To a introverted kid in a sleep Philly suburb, this song was a key to a yearned-for future. I was instantly certain that that no one around me had ever heard this song. If only I could make out some words, maybe I could spend the next year scanning the distant radio bands to hear it again. As I got older, I could go into the city to scour bins in the seediest of indie record stores. This song no one knew would be a touchstones to a new adulthood I was constructing in the secret of my bedroom.

As the fade came, I barely caught the DJ’s words through the static. “Hotel California.” I vowed to myself that someday, somehow, I would find this song and hear it again.

RIP Glenn Frey.

For fairness sake, here’s “Theo”:/theo with the Thomas/Gordan song: