Amber Flowers
For more than 40 years, holiday revelers have gathered at Mammoth Cave National Park on the first Sunday in December for an underground musical extravaganza called Cave Sing. This year, the celebration features four musical performances in the unique venue.
Guests for the one-of-a-kind event will gather at the national park visitor center and walk down into the cave together. Two instrumentalists will entertain guests in the passageways as they journey to the concert space. Trumpeter Hillary Sward, a former music teacher, is now a park guide. She has performed at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the inaugural parade for President Barack Obama’s second term, and on tours in Europe and China. Flutist Ema Plafcan is a Student Conservation Association intern at the park. She played in numerous music groups while pursuing her music degree at the University of Arkansas.
The two mainstage performances will take place in Rafinesque Hall, one of the cave’s large rooms, where each group will sing five or six songs apiece. Made up of a group of friends from Glasgow, the Band Table Singers began singing around their high school breakfast table. The group specializes in gospel music. The Caveman Chorus has been part of the local arts community for 50 years, entertaining audiences with a range of music in a “barbershop” style of four-part a cappella harmony.
After the performances, the hall will darken, lit only by a Christmas tree and candles held by guests. Everyone will join in a carol sing, filling the cave passages with joyful music.
This year, a festive reception will be held after the musical event at The Lodge at Mammoth Cave. The Lodge is newly reopened after having been closed for two years of renovations. Expect light refreshments, hot beverages, a story read by Santa Claus, and elves distributing candy canes.
Kennetha Sanders, a lead cave guide and park ranger, has been involved in the Cave Sing for many years. With Chris Clark, Sanders is one of the organizers this year. Word of mouth was the main promotion of the Cave Sing for many years, but with social media plugs last year, the event drew 900 people—one of the largest crowds ever in Mammoth Cave. In expectation of a similarly large crowd this year, organizers are moving the event from the traditional Methodist Church room to Rafinesque Hall to accommodate more people.
“The acoustics are wonderful in the cave,” Sanders said when asked what makes the sing so special. “The taller ceilings in the big rooms create a buoyancy, and the music bounces around. It carries down corridors and rings through passageways.”
Christmases of Yore
Above, The Lindsey Wilson College Singers perform at the annual Cave Sing event at Mammoth Cave National Park. Left, several cave visitors gather around the historic tree in Mammoth Cave in 1936.NPS Photo
Mammoth Cave National Park first held this annual holiday gathering in 1980, and the celebration has run continuously since except for a two-year hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a cherished tradition for locals and park visitors, including those who travel from out of state. At least one of Kentucky’s lieutenant governors has participated, and, last year, Yo-Yo Ma and members of the Louisville Orchestra came in advance of their cave concert in April 2023.
Christmas traditions in the cave have a much longer history than this modern holiday sing. A tuberculosis patient, who lived in the cave during its short-lived period as an experimental treatment facility for the disease, wrote that he heard visitors singing carols in December 1842. The first formal account of a Christmas celebration in the cave was in 1883, when area residents sang carols around a 10-foot cedar tree in the Methodist Church area. They decorated the tree with ribbons and stringed popcorn, and surrounded it with lanterns and candles to illuminate the festivities.
For some reason lost to history, that tree became a fixture in the cave. The tree dried out, but the brown needles remained in place. It became a popular stop for visitors, who hung letters and business cards in its branches as a sign that they had been there. Eventually, the tree was cut up and moved out of sight of the trails, where it remained until a park ranger’s torch throwing demonstration (part of the cave tour until 1990) threw a spark onto the desiccated wood. Spreading light one last time, the holiday tree’s demise is jokingly referred to as the only known forest fire inside Mammoth Cave.
Other music was part of the Mammoth Cave experience through much of the 1800s. Visitors were invited to sing on early cave tours to appreciate the unique audio reverberations. Musicians sought to perform in certain locations that were known for particularly good acoustics. A string band maneuvered their instruments through Fat Man’s Misery, a particularly narrow passageway, to reach their perfect spot. In 1845, renowned Norwegian violinist Ole Bull visited Mammoth Cave to play in a cave chamber now known as Ole Bull’s Concert Hall.
A Cherished Tradition
As befits a 40-year event, the Cave Sing is steeped in tradition. Through the years, performers have included college choirs, school groups, local bands, a park service staff band, violinists and a pianist.
“Everyone around here has a connection to working at the cave—whether themselves or family members,” Sanders said.
That is the case for Michael Goodman, a Friends of Mammoth Cave board member, who plans to attend the Cave Sing this year for the 10th time. His great-grandfather was a cave guide in the 1930s. His grandfather was born where the visitor center stands today before Mammoth Cave was a national park. The grandfather spent his working career there, first as a guide in the 1950s, then as the chief of interpretation until his retirement in 1992.
Goodman grew up in Park City and visited the cave frequently in his childhood but didn’t attend the sing until he began his own decade-long stint as a cave guide in 2008. “I tried to attend every year after that,” he said. “It is a kind of homecoming for former seasonal guides.”
A special memory for Goodman was the year he was chosen as emcee for the event, where he gave the safety and introductory talk to hundreds of guests and orchestrated their journey.
Sanders explained the Cave Sing coordinators choose who will serve in the emcee role, which usually is bestowed on a seasonal park guide with many years of experience. Dave Spence emceed last year, and Ashley Decker will do it this year. “It is a very big honor to be chosen, since we only have one chance a year,” Sanders said.
Aside from his history with the cave, what draws Goodman back is the variety of holiday music with a foundation in traditional Christmas carols. He has fond memories of the returning barber-shop group Cavemen Chorus and the choir from Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia. That, and the “tropical” feel: With a steady temperature of 54 degrees, the cave often is warmer than the outside air in December.
Along with the natural acoustics, there is something special about being surrounded by hundreds of people sharing the same experience. There is a 5,000-year legacy of people interacting within the longest cave system in the world—as a shelter, a place to explore, a concert hall and a church.
“I encourage people to check out the Cave Sing and experience it for themselves,” Goodman said. “It is a unique experience you can’t do anywhere else. There were significant human uses of Mammoth Cave throughout human history, and the Cave Sing adds to those long-standing cultural traditions.”
Dec. 3, 2PM, CST
Mammoth Cave National Park Visitor Center
The Cave Sing is a free event. The round-trip walk is about three-quarters of a mile, with 60 steps down and back out of the cave. Visitors remain standing for the entire event.