Thanks very much, DrWHO, for your recommendation of the Boston Hash House Harriers, whose Web site I have found. I can use the exercise, too.

In my earlier Boston incarnation, ca. 1960, somewhat similar conviviality (with less emphasis on bawdry) was provided by the MIT Outing Club, which had parties at which singing took place (most of them, conveniently, in the rooming house in Cambridge where I lived). In addition to the usual folk instruments we had an oldfashioned pump organ powered by a vacuum cleaner in the closet. (MITOC even had its own songbook.) Climbers, in those days, were another subculture that sang spontaneously. Many of the songs collected by Messrs Edwards & Kelley in _The Coffee House Songbook_ are annotated as having been learned, not in coffee houses, but in climbers' camps. I remember a wonderful party in Kingston, NY, in the late '60s, mostly rockclimbers, with two kegs of beer and a barrel of chocolate-chip cookies, in which a little knot of people in the middle of the room sang "Crusher Bailey" for quite a long while.

--- Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

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