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Norwegian Singers’ Association of America 11th Sangerfest.

July 1912, Fargo, North Dakota.

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Sängerfest badges, Frederick Crane Collection

The processing of Fred Crane’s collection has turned up another gem! Tucked inside this PowerBook battery case (which is a magnificent relic in its own right) were two ribbons from Sängerfests held around the turn of the century.

Burlington, IA, 1900

Davenport, IA 1890s?

Sängerfests were competitions for Sängerbunds, or chorus societies, largely formed by German immigrants to the United States after 1850. They were immensely popular and could draw tens of thousands of singers to a single, regional location for the ultimate sing-off. Männerchor (men’s choruses) were the core of the Sängerbunds, and could be found throughout the U.S., but primarily in the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, Midwest, and Texas.

There are still Männerchor performing today, but their heyday was in the latter half of the nineteenth century leading up to the outbreak of World War I. The most comprehensive study on the topic is a dissertation written right here at the University of Iowa; Suzanne Snyder’s “The Männerchor Tradition in the United States,” completed in 1991 under the supervision of...Dr. Frederick Crane! It’s 576 pages on the choruses and the festivals, including discussions of where the festivals were held, the buildings - temporary and permanent - constructed to house them, local arrangements that sound akin those used for Iowa’s RAGBRAI, musical repertoire of the Männerchor, and even a section on “Alcohol at Sängerfests” where Snyder talks about how liquor and the festivals were portrayed in the media.

...this extensive coverage of Sängerfest picnics...gave the journalist (and the reader) the chance to reinforce some preconceived ideas linking the Germans as an ethnic group with excessive indulgence in alcoholic beverages. Although this stereotyping usually took the form of good-natured ribbing...it was nonetheless effective in painting a picture of the immigrants in which the bottle and the keg were vividly represented.