Northern Arms

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A BATTALION OF THROATS A Brief Account of Northern Arms Nearing the end of my third year as station director for WNLW Pittsburgh I received an envelope with a Philadelphia return address from an outfit calling themselves Northern Arms. This was late fall of 2006. Inside I found an unlabeled cassette tape as well as a short letter explaining that upon hearing a recent three hour program on our station in which the show was divided equally between the history of sacred harp music and the scarcely catalogued tradition of shaker hymns, the gentlemen of the group, who I later learned were only two, felt that I may find their music suitable for programming. Unfortunately, there was no longer a cassette player in existence on WNLW premises on which I could review any work. Groups had ceased using the format some time ago and so all compatible equipment had been dismantled or donated elsewhere. I ended up setting the envelope aside for nearly a month until a week after Christmas when I took a ride to the suburb of Lower Burell where my younger brother Lou was living in a rented room on Wayne Street. In those days he was the owner of a spent Honda with a tape deck in working order. And so we sat after his shift that night in the near vacant lot of Wildlife Lanes and hit the play button while drinking coffee and staring at the numerous splits and chips in the windshield. My introduction to Northern Arms began with a faint hiss that was soon overcome by a single organ note follow

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