[3] Larry Gordon was born in Rome, Georgia, on July 3, 1945, to Jewish parents who were living in the American South to work for the USO during WWII.

[9] After a friend from SDS moved to Plainfield, Vermont, in the late 1960s, Gordon visited him there and became involved in helping to build what would become the New Hamburger Cooperative, and lived there at the co-op for about 15 years.

Between 1973 and 1976, the group refined their focus, increasing their performance activity and continuing to promote Sacred Harp music, and published a collection called the "Early American Songbook" (1975) in standard, non-shaped notation.

[16] The ensemble toured the southern United States and released an album, Rivers of Delight: American Folk Hymns from the Sacred Harp Tradition, in 1978.

[Ethnomusicologist] Kiri Miller devotes an entire subsection of her book to a critique of the Word of Mouth Chorus and their 1979 album Rivers of Delight where she essentially claims a hijacking of The Sacred Harp for the purposes of a personal project.

[18]Nevertheless, Lueck writes, "it is still important to consider the positive impact that the professional presentations of the Word of Mouth Chorus had on Sacred Harp singing in New England, and subsequently across the Atlantic."

However, Gordon wrote only one song in the Sacred Harp tradition, a setting of Dylan Thomas' celebrated poem Do not go gentle into that good night.

[32] When it became clear that recovery was not possible, Gordon's family and loved ones made the decision to remove him from life support, and he died shortly thereafter, on November 9, at the age of 76.

Other vigils and memorials were held concurrently elsewhere, including Brattleboro, Boston, Western Massachusetts, New York, Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle, England, Germany and South Africa.

He was a singer whose "loud, booming bass ran counterpoint to his casual dress in concert and low-key, down-home manner with audiences", a strong leader whose authority stemmed from his apparently total faith in those he taught, his belief that "anyone could do what[ever] he needed them to do.