The Tabernacle Choir: Founded the Year the Pioneers Arrived
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
The Tabernacle Choir was organized on August twenty-second, eighteen forty-seven. The advance party had entered the valley on July twenty-second. The choir was founded in the first month after arrival, thirty days into the project of building a city.
The founders were British converts to the LDS faith who had brought choral traditions with them across the Atlantic and then across the plains. John Parry, a Welshman, became the first director. The choir performed in the bowery, an outdoor structure of logs and brush that served as the community's gathering place in the absence of a permanent building. It performed in the Tabernacle once that building was completed in eighteen seventy-five, and it has performed there ever since.
The Tabernacle itself is an engineering achievement of the pioneer period. Its roof, an enormous oval dome two hundred fifty feet long and one hundred fifty feet wide, was built without the use of nails, using wooden pegs and rawhide lashings to hold a lattice of timbers. The dome is supported at its perimeter by forty-four sandstone columns. The acoustic effect of the interior is such that a pin dropped at the front of the space can be heard at the back, a demonstration that tour guides have been performing for visitors for a century and a half.
The choir now numbers over three hundred fifty singers and has performed at ten United States presidential inaugurations, beginning with William Howard Taft in nineteen oh nine. It has broadcast weekly radio programs continuously since nineteen twenty-nine, and weekly television programs since nineteen forty-nine, making it one of the longest-running continuous broadcast programs in the history of American radio. What started with Welshmen singing in a brush shelter became a piece of permanent American audio infrastructure.
