Origins of Euphonius Feminist & Non-Performing Quintet (EF&N-PQ): the singing arm of the women’s movement

By Pat Davitt

It was the sixties. In the sixties, we all wanted to be Bob Dylan or (in my case, Joan Baez). Moreover, I had what every aspiring folk singer dreamt of, an expensive guitar (thanks to the enthusiasm of my then-husband, who played his own guitar like he’d been born with it in his hands). I had the freedom to “play” mine totally incompetently, and the capacity to more or less form three connected chords: I believe they were C, F, and G7. You can sing a lot of songs in C, F, and G7, but not if you have to find the right spots for your fingers on six strings while remembering the words and the tune of the song which you are allegedly singing. In these circumstances, one might be tempted to sell the guitar and take up knitting instead.

Then, as it has a tendency to happen, life intervened. It was probably in 1971, at some point after the Indo-Chinese Women’s conference and all, when I attended a party of assorted Simon Fraser University-connected, self-described leftists, radicals, revolutionaries and assorted young and young-at-heart people who just wanted to have a good time.

Enter Marge Hollibaugh. Marge was an older (and very wise) woman who was connected by marriage to Ace Hollibaugh, an older Big Man On Campus at Simon Fraser, a leader in the student movement and a generally respected man of distinction well-known to everyone, professors and students alike. Marge accompanied Ace to parties of the student left, and that’s how we met, in the living room of Eddie Haskell Bunker (the co-op home of several of our fellow revolutionary students). Because we found the endlessly repetitive conversation of our fellow revolutionaries less than riveting, Marge and I adjourned to the kitchen, and our conversation drifted into non-political areas…including our mutual inability to play guitar. I had a guitar and had to admit that I only knew three chords; Marge also had a guitar and had to admit she only knew three chords – but they were a different set of chords!!!  It didn’t take rocket science, just two smart women, to figure out that we could get together and share our musical knowledge, have fun, and double our musical repertoire!

The icing on the cake was Marge remembering that Dodie Weppler was in the same predicament that we shared:  one guitar, one set of chords and no real impetus to learn any more. Marge phoned Dodie, the three of us met, and began to share and learn three (!) different chord progressions. We were on our way to musical brilliance, relatively speaking.

Dodie left that fall for England and graduate studies, but  Maggie Benston, a professor of Chemistry at Simon Fraser and another guitarist manqué (that’s French; we Canadian are mas o menos bi-lingual – mostly menos).  Maggie had been given her guitar by a mutual friend, and she too was lacking the skills or support to learn how to play it. It was meant to be!  We could get together once a week, choose some songs that we all wanted to learn, and work on them…so we did.

And where did we find the songs? Well, some were published in magazines like “Sing Out”; others were included in biographies and purpose-written material by various song writers (See the partial book list below). Some were played often enough on the radio (CBC, of course) to learn them from the air waves, and some, like “We Shall Overcome” were in the air we breathed. Who didn’t know it?

And as we (members of the singing group) marched as participants through the streets of downtown Vancouver with our picket signs held high for a variety of political events, such as the annual International Women’s Day March and rally, anti-war demonstrations, pro-union and political fund-raisers (a variety of causes that we all supported), it began to occur to us that we could garner more attention from the broad masses  if there was more going on than just people ankling up the street, chanting  and sporadically calling out the slogans of the day. We needed something that would capture onlookers’ interest in a positive way, in a way that would capture their attention without putting them off the message. Hmmm. What about a song or two?  Yup. That would work.

Turned out, that if you’re singing at/with people, they are far more likely to listen. They are intrigued by how you could possibly be walking up the middle of Granville Street in Vancouver and be singing! Really? Yes, really. And it gave courage and enthusiasm to the people we were walking with, who started to sing along – why not? It was more fun to sing than not to sing. And even some of the people watching and whispering on the sides of the street could get hooked into singing along with “We Shall Overcome” and other very familiar songs of the times. As our repertoire and experience expanded, we began to actively encourage the other marchers to join in, and since we mostly sang songs that everyone knew, it worked!

Just a small caveat has to be raised here. We are talking about Vancouver, on the Wet Coast (and that’s not a typo), so we often marched without our guitars because they would have been destroyed by the rain.  We were willing to sacrifice the odd tambourine for the cause, but the musical accompaniment was pretty much reserved for the speeches at the end-point gathering place where, if we were very fortunate, there was a roof of sorts that we could strum and sing under in relative dryness, and even (gasp) a microphone or two so that the weary marchers could hear us…and sing along.

Our repertoire was shaped by the need to sing songs that would reflect the interests and the passions of our audience and ourselves: “Solidarity Forever” (Ralph Chaplin); “Carry It On” (Gil Turner); “You’ve Gotta Go Down …and join the union” (Woody Guthrie); “Working Girl Blues” (Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard); “We Can Change the World” (Joe Mock). We became seen (and were referred to) as the “singing arm of the women’s movement” and much sought after by protest organizers. Rally attendees liked the songs and clearly wanted to sing, so we provided everyone with song sheets prepared for each event so that the crowd could be part of the action (which accounts for the three thousand old, even historic, song sheets I still have in my basement). And where did we find the songs? Well, some were published in magazines like “Sing Out”; others were included in biographies and purpose-written material by various song writers (See the partial book list below). Some were played often enough on the radio (CBC, of course) to learn them from the air waves, and some, like “We Shall Overcome” were in the air we breathed. Who didn’t know it? We didn’t just march; we were quite versatile. Walking was another activity that we supported and participated in… mostly on picket lines.  Jackie Ainsworth remembers the “integral role” that the singing group played in the Muckamuck restaurant strike, and the contribution of energy that permitted the strikers “to hold that line for two years. In the face of employer-instigated and sanctioned violence, especially on the weekends, the EF&NPQ attendance and leadership in terms of singing and playing those famous guitars were vital to the ability of the picketers to stay calm and carry on. I think we need to mention the importance of this and the fact that it wasn’t all peaches and cream and folksy fun at demos and rallies. There were hard times on that line and the EF&NPQ were there as musicians and committed picketers.” She went on to write that this was important “in terms of SORWUC’s ability (Service, Office and Retail Workers Union of Canada) to support workers in the face of an intractable and viciously anti-union employer.”

And when (and how) did we become the Euphoniously Feminist and Non-Performing Quintet, you ask? We didn’t start out our singing activities with a group name at all; we just marched and sang, and made it possible for others to sing with us. But after a couple of years and some consistency in membership, we came to realize that we would have to address the subject of Naming the Group. We sat around my kitchen table and threw out possible names and rapidly dismissed them all: Elektra’s Chorus (NO); Luna’s Lunatic Singers (NO), the Women’s Chorale (NO), etc. Finally, I remembered the ad hoc student band that more or less played at the University of Saskatchewan during my days there. They were not professional musicians, although fairly competent, they didn’t practice a lot, they obviously had a lot of fun playing in their time off from classes, and I wondered if their example could show us a way: they were called “The Intensely Vigorous College Nine” and the wonderful thing about them was that they had more fun than intensity, were pretty laid back, were mostly in university and they would arrive at gigs with anywhere from five to twenty-five people.  A little bit of free-association around the table produced “The Euphoniously Feminist and Non-Performing Quintet: more or less in tune, definitely feminist, non-performing because we invited people to sing with us and didn’t expect that we would have to do all the work ourselves, and numerically – anywhere from two to six or seven women at any particular gig, depending on who was available. It was perfect!

Looking back over more than 40 years of EF&N-PQ, there have been changes in personnel, in our musical choices and sources of songs.  With hundreds of marches and platform performances in the rain and in sunshine under our collective belts, and many a concert to raise money for worthy causes, we realized that people might want to take the songs with them at the end of the event. Two Euphonious tapes (of old favourites) and two CD’s (moving into the era of writing our own songs) made that possible, as will our plan to construct our own web-site in the next year, with an album-full of new songs that haven’t been recorded before (2017) plus all the old ones! How can you find it? Google Euphoniously Feminist and Non-Performing Quintet, of course….or maybe just EF&N-PQ, and sing along.

Related Materials

Song for Ourselves Revisited by Pat Davitt in Canadian Women Studies, Vol. 13, #2.