How Can I Keep From Singing?

Catherine Roma has led community singing in a variety of locations and types, but she has a specific passion for working with incarcerated people. creating choruses and music that reflects a focus on dignity and social change. She discusses experiences and lessons from her more than 30 years of leading singing in prisons in Ohio.

Betsy Rose has been a singer and songwriter for over 50 years. Apart from her compelling and poetic writing, she has a passion for group singing, especially in political and cultural change contexts. Her songs have taken her around the world, but lately her main stage is at political street protests.
more at betsyrosemusic.com
 
 

My guests in this podcast are Denis Donelly, Cathy Baker and Dick Jackson. Denis, Cathy and Dick are codirectors of the community choir leadership training in Victoria British Columbia. The training began in 2004 and continues to this day with a yearly program of a two-week intensive in-person session and a full year of mentorship and ongoing networking opportunities through the Ubuntu Choirs Network. They each bring a rich history of singing and directing choirs and ta deep commitment to the empowerment and community that singing together creates.
 
https://www.communitychoirleadership.com/index.php

John McCutcheon has performed for audiences around the world for over 50 years. Beside his considerable musical talents, he's a committed song leader with a long history of encouraging connection and activism through group singing. We talk about his development of song leading as a skill and a passion. 
 
John's Website

Esther Morgan-Ellis shares the joys and the structures of this old style of singing together. The exuberance of the practice is echoed in Esther's own enthusiasm for the power of this tradition. 
Esther Morgan-Ellis is a historical musicologist who focuses on participatory musical traditions, especially community singing and old-time music-making. She has written extensively about the early twentieth-century American community singing movement. Her research also explores contemporary traditions such as Sacred Harp singing, hymn singing, and revivalist old-time music, examining how communities sustain and reshape these practices over time. As editor and lead author of the open-access textbook Resonances: Engaging Music in Its Cultural Context, she highlights musical traditions from around the world to show how music functions within diverse societies. In both her scholarship and her work as a performer and educator, she emphasizes the social bonds and shared histories that grow out of collective music-making.
 
 
And the global singings website: https://shapenotesingings.com/
 
 

Sam Lee is a British folk singer, song collector, and environmental activist who founded Singing with Nightingales, an immersive springtime series that brings audiences into the woods to experience live music in duet with nightingales.  A Mercury Prize–nominated artist and passionate nature conservationist, he uses this project to connect people more deeply with the natural world, blending traditional song, storytelling, and ecological awareness into a powerful shared experience.
 
 
 
What is the song of a Nightingale if not a celebration of life? An expression of the energy in the roots of Spring, coursing up through the earth, through the trunks of the blackthorn thickets, through the leaves, the blossoms, through the buzzing insects and the munching caterpillars, streaming at last through the syrinx of our little brown birds as they perch at the peak of the season. Sometimes it seems as if they sing the season into being, sometimes they are the season’s self.
 
It’s one of the reasons we come to the woods every spring – to learn how to sing praise like this, and to sing praise ourselves. The Nightingale has maybe forty years left in Britain. Myself and the SWN team are intent on making those years good ones.
 
https://www.singingwithnightingales.co.uk

Chau Yoder was born in Hanoi, Vietnam. Since 1989, she has offered workshops and classes in Mindful Living, in youth, corporate retreat, and community settings.
Chau was Trained by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and ordained as a Dharma Teacher in 2003. She’s dedicated to sharing practical methods of mindful living that cultivate awareness of body and mind. She’s also a retired engineer, who spent 25 years at Chevron.
Chau lives in Walnut Creek, California, with her husband Jim, and is a grateful mother of two daughters and a grandmother of four.

Singing that fills the living room or dining room or basement or kitchen is a tradition that's probably as old as group singing in itself. Phil, Beth, and Scott talk about their experience and tips for inviting people in to your home and to the songs themselves.
Phil Hoose information. 
Beth and Scott Bierko information
 
and a written piece by Phil and Faith Petric.
These days, many people can’t imagine singing out loud without a Karaoke machine.   It seems a shame, for nothing brings people together like making your own music in a group.   To help revive and energize the great art of living room singing, we two veterans of it would like to offer a few suggestions.  
 
Faith’s Part.  
 
Phil:   For about 35 years now I’ve been hosting group singing parties in my home.   Often I co-host them with a group of folks who come up to Maine from Boston to spend the weekend.   I don’t belong to an official Folk Club as Faith does, but I do try to schedule these events regularly.  I host one sing in the winter, one in the summer and usually one in the autumn.  We have a pretty big living room, enough to accommodate about 25 people.  Heaven for me is a place within a circle of those folks, when everyone’s voice is raised together in song.  
 
Here’s how I organize singing parties, with a few tips and precautions:
 
*About 2 months ahead of the date I send out an e-mail invitation to the usual suspects, inviting them to come and bring no more than one guest.   Usually the party is on a weekend night.   Our tradition is “Potluck at 5:30, singing at 7:00.”   We sing until we give out, which is earlier than it used to be.   I pass around a clipboard and ask everyone to update their contact numbers.  
 
*Sometimes, b ut not always, I propose—or solicit--a theme for the evening, pointing out that the theme can be broadly defined.  For example, once we did “lust,” but it turned out that every song anyone could think of turned out to be lusty in one way or another (e.g., “Amazing Grace” is really about lust for salvation and a of courser man must have lust for the lure of the mines, etc). 
 
*Children are welcome.   Often someone brings a movie or two for children who get tired of hearing their parents sing.  What do you do if a child grabs one of your harmonicas and wails in the wrong key during a lovely ballad?  Beam.  
 
*I ask everyone to bring five copies of the words and chords to their song.   If you ask for 25 copies, you end up wading through an ocean of paper on the floor the next morning.   Besides, if three or four people have to look on to same sheet, harmonies erupt.       
 
*Format:  We go around in a circle, with each person getting to name and, if they like, lead a song.  They also get to describe the accompaniment they want.  Many say, “let’s do this without instruments,” (or, in the parlance that has developed at our house, “holster your capellas”).  Sometimes we flip a coin to see whether we’re going clockwise or counter-clockwise around the room.  This can be a big deal, since it can take more than an hour to get around a big circle.
 
*Rise Up Singing (the Bible).   Alas, as our group ages, this glorious book becomes increasingly less relevant.   The font is now way too small for us.  A Rise Up Singing that our group could read would be thicker than the Tokyo phonebook.  Nonetheless, many folks still bring it, and still depend on it.  As their turn approaches, you can see them flipping through it, necks bowed, squinting at the tiny, tiny words.  
 
*Tuning.   We start the evening by tuning together, and stop to tune occasionally.   Staying in tune makes the evening so much better (ironically, after tuning for fifteen minutes, we traditionally lift off the party with The Beatles’ “One After 909,” which invariably knocks everything right back out of tune). 
 

Heather Mae is a genre‑defying artist‑activist whose music blends the storytelling intimacy of folk with the grit of alternative rock and the hooks of indie pop. She writes anthems about mental health, queer liberation, survivor empowerment, and social justice, inviting listeners into a space of radical honesty and shared vulnerability. Her double‑album project WHAT THEY HID FROM ME has helped to build a devoted community of “light‑seekers” and “good‑troublemakers” Her concerts feel less like passive performances and more like participatory gatherings that remind audiences they are worthy, not alone, and very much still here. And I would add Heather Mae has recently been spending time in Minneapolis and brings her unique perspective on what’s happening in the streets and in the shared voices of a resisting community.
the song Hold On in the podcast was written by Heidi Wilson. 
/Heather Mae's website
 
 

Jane Sapp is a nationally admired cultural worker, musician, educator, folklorist, and activist whose approach to social transformation is rooted in the African American musical, cultural, spiritual and human rights traditions. Through her singing, documenting local culture and stories, song-writing workshops, and other expressive work with diverse communities and youth, Jane actively engages people in creative cultural processes that help them understand and see not only the challenges faced by their communities, but their assets as well. Jane has many recordings and a book Let’s Make a Better World: Stories and Songs of Jane Sapp. She has sung all over the country and farther, and her influence reaches around the world. Among other things she is currently working to document her stories as a way to reflect on her own work and on the cultural history of the last fifty years.
 
https://www.janesapp.org/about