PORT ANGELES — If you hear voices lifted in song this Sunday morning, they may well be coming from the Dungeness Crab & Seafood Festival.
Yes, the North Olympic Peninsula’s venerable gospel choir and a quartet of young singers will seek to awaken the waterfront Sunday in the fourth annual Crab Fest Revival, an event open to all comers.
“This is not like any revival you’ve ever attended,” promises Michael Rivers, leader of the assembly — and director of the Peninsula Men’s Gospel Singers.
He’ll bring the choir, with accompanist Penny Hall and sign-language interpreter Karen Coles, together at 9 a.m. at the Gateway pavilion at Front and Lincoln streets, just across from the festival’s Crab Central tent.
Admission is free to the revival, which should run about 90 minutes.
To those who think of a gospel revival as a gathering where the preacher talks about hellfire and damnation, Rivers has news.
Just as the Crab Fest is about abundance of food, drink, music and people, Sunday’s revival is about “good news, joy, celebration,” he said.
The 15-voice Peninsula Men’s Gospel Singers plan on reveling in that, with “You Raise Me Up,” a special arrangement of “Lean on Me” they’ve yet to perform publicly, and “This Little Light of Mine,” which will be one of the morning’s join-in-and-sing numbers.
The Men’s Gospel Singers’ Little Brass Band will join in too, as will a new quartet Rivers put together. Peninsula College student Karesandra White, who’s performed with the college’s Vocal Jazz Ensemble, along with Port Angeles High School seniors Clare Wiswell, Beth Ann Brackett and Scott Anders, will bring “Ten Thousand Reasons,” “Soon and Very Soon” and a rendition of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” that Rivers says would not be out of place in a church in Harlem.
“It goes off,” he said, adding, “it’s hysterical.”
At the start and at the finish, Rivers will invite everybody at the Gateway to sing.
That’s “a great way to start your morning,” he said, not to mention an effective way to warm a body up for other Crab Fest pursuits on the windy waterfront.
For details about Crab Central music, food and activities, see www.Crab festival.org.
