Singing…

I love to sing with people whose voices are not trained. Especially those who do not necessarily always hit the right notes. Why? Because, in those situations people are usually unconscious about how they sound. The true way they feel about what they are singing bubbles out and spills all around them. It’s hard to know how someone feels about what they are singing if that person’s voice is trained or well practiced because their concern with hitting the notes properly seems to keep the emotions they might feel from oozing out into the open. Often it sounds as if the person’s emotions are not engaged because they’re thinking about the mechanics of singing rather than the song itself. It seems as if the related feelings corresponding to the music that might have been generated never come to life. Nowhere did this difference show itself more than during Sunday night church services when I was growing up. There, you could hear the various voices throughout the congregation rise to the ceiling when folks singing would lose themselves in the feelings of the songs.