The Voice Does the Work

Here’s a small puzzle. What is something that happens at Rockbrook every single day, more than once, that almost never happens back home? It happens before she’s even fully awake, at breakfast, when a table of bleary-eyed campers gives thanks with “We Have Been Given a New Day.” It happens again at lunch, and again at dinner, in a different key each time. It happens riding the bus to Sliding Rock. It happens at morning assembly, at birthdays, and when a girl swims her way into becoming a “mermaid.” Sometimes it’s sweet and lovely; other times it’s explosively enthusiastic. It can happen while hiking, often while doing skits, and always at our Sunday Chapels. And it happens last thing each night, when the whole camp goes quiet enough to hear “Day Is Done” before lights out. The answer, if you haven’t guessed it, is singing.

At Rockbrook, we sing every day, and throughout the day. Over the 105-year history of the camp, singing has become one of the core traditions of this place, central to its culture. Our printed songbook now holds more than 120 different songs, new and old, silly and serious. You can hear a good number of them for yourself on our website. They are sorted into categories like pep songs, silly songs, traditional songs, and so forth. Here’s one of my favorites.

For some campers, the lyrics are a big part of why they love certain songs. Of course, many of the tunes are also simply catchy, but certain phrases take on an extra meaning of their own. “‘Twas fate we came to Rockbrook, and you became my friend” and “Like a fairyland of beauty, where friendships so true are born” are good examples. One alum told me she hums the canoeing song under her breath when she’s feeling nervous about something. It goes, “Hold fast, don’t lose your nerve, keep your paddle in your hand going around the curve.” Long after her time at camp, and in moments that have nothing to do with canoeing at all, this Rockbrook song retains its power. These are songs that stick with you.

Why do we sing so much at Rockbrook? The easy answer is that it’s good for you, good for our overall wellbeing, and plenty of research points to that. Likewise, I think we can say more than just “singing is fun,” though it’s that too. A more interesting question is to ask what singing does at camp. Three things come to mind.

The first is that singing synchronizes a group, out loud, in a way you can literally hear happening. Watch a table of campers start “Way Up in the Sky” and it’s obvious. In the dining hall, the Hi-Up campers ring their tiny bell that signals to everyone a song is starting, and within a few bars we have almost 300 people, campers and counselors alike, waving their hands the same way at the same moment, raising the pitch of their voices for the high parts and dropping their voices to a rumble for others. It’s phenomenal to see a room full of individual people briefly becoming one thing. Seemingly without any rehearsal, singing creates this mysterious synchrony like a flock of birds turning in the sky. Every chorus tightens that bond. Every harmony deepens it.

The second reason singing matters so much at Rockbrook is that it makes every camper a participant in the camp’s culture, a member of the community here. Singing builds that community through doing— in this case, by willingly joining in with your voice. When a song begins in the dining hall, every camper is helping make Rockbrook happen in that moment, rather than simply sitting back to receive something already finished. Just as the song depends on their voices, camp depends on their genuine, active, embodied, participation. The voice does the work.

This shared participation matters, by the way, because it contrasts so starkly with what Jonathan Haidt calls the “screen-based childhood” he’s identified as common these days. That life asks very little of kids: watch, scroll, like, skip, repeat, all of it steered by whatever an algorithm decides to serve next. What’s left is a subtle loneliness, each kid alone in a private stream of content shaped just for her. Camp singing works in the opposite direction. It asks a girl to be active, to contribute something— her voice, her timing, her courage to join. Singing at camp teaches a girl that she helps create community by leaning in, rather than simply receiving it.

That’s the third thing singing does at camp. It pulls you in. Singing together is an immediate invitation to the group, an open avenue to belong, to be one of “us.” Camp songs are meant for exactly that, for including everyone, for creating something together. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know all the words, or sing off-key— the goofier the better. The point was always a collective sound, one with room in it for absolutely everyone— not the best singer chasing perfection or mastery. And it works. New campers, protected by the form itself (loud and silly, no solos, no critiques), simply open their mouths to sing, and instantly they’ve joined the group. To sing is almost an instinct at Rockbrook, and as soon as you do, you know you belong.

None of this depends on the songs being polished, sophisticated, or especially impressive in the ordinary sense. It’s the process, not the product, that we care about. The benefits arise simply from the singing. And those benefits— synchronizing a room, encoding a culture, including absolutely everyone— are happening whether or not anyone in the dining hall is thinking about it in those terms. After all, we’re just singing.

An alum once told me about her mother, who had spent years suffering from dementia— names, faces, whole decades fading away. But when prompted with a Rockbrook song, one her mother hadn’t heard in fifty years, she could sing every word. I think about that sometimes, how a song, sung enough times as a girl, gathered around a table with people she loved, can survive underneath all of it. More than just a nice tradition, we sing at Rockbrook because some things are too important to risk forgetting. Things like knowing you belong, knowing you are part of something, knowing you are a valuable friend to someone. A song, sung enough times, is one of the surest ways we know to remember.