Sacred Rainbow Nation Songs of Light, Peace and Love · About
Almost nothing sung at a Rainbow Gathering began there. The repertoire is a borrowed commons — fire-circle chants, kirtans, gospel rewrites, rounds and blessings — so a song is counted as a Rainbow song not by where it came from, but by whether the circles took it up. The working rule: a song belongs if it is attested at least twice, independently, with at least one attestation from a gathering itself — a songbook passed hand to hand there, or a field recording of it being sung. Songs carried purely in living memory enter through a first-person account from the person who carries them; those are the Living additions.
Popularity is judged from countable evidence rather than taste: how many independent songbooks print a song, how often it turns up across twenty-six years of field recordings, whether the community’s own compilations and song sites carry it, and how far it has travelled in years and geography. Songbook incidence weighs heaviest — someone chose to write a song down so it could be sung again. The first fifty were chosen this way by the 2026 census, which drew on 46 independent songbooks, the community archives and the recorded evidence; that Core 50 is now complete, and the same rules carry the index on toward a vetted Core 100. A song joins the index only after its evidence has been checked and a verdict recorded; where the evidence is still thin, the song waits off the index rather than appearing with a caveat.
The index ranks songs by attestation: #1 is the song printed in the most books of the Rainbow Songbook Collection. The count is an automated title search across the collection’s 46 songbooks; image-only scans, which cannot be searched, are matched against hand-made page indexes. Books with no more than one core song are retired from the collection, so every book counted is a Rainbow songbook. A song printed under a different title can be missed.
The songbooks preserve the words and chords; the melodies are the endangered part. Each melody here is restored from the best evidence available for that song — the books’ occasional hand notation, published sheet music, or recordings of actual singing — and every page names its sources. Pages marked draft on the index are still being checked against those sources.
A few songs the circles love are under active copyright. They are honored by reference only — their notation is left with the rights holders.