More Loud and Deep

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

God is not dead nor doth He sleep;

The wrong shall fail,

The right prevail

With peace on earth, good will to men.

My dad is a gifted storyteller. One of my favorite stories he tells is about his college roommate, Richard Zeller. As I understand it, Richard and my dad sat up late one night talking in their dorm room, and somewhere around 1:00 am, a disgruntled neighbor from three or four doors down banged on their door to complain that he had clearly heard every word Richard said for the past several hours, and could they kindly please shut up and go to sleep.

As you’ll know if you followed the link above, Richard Zeller is now “one of America’s foremost baritones.” He’s got a resonant and glorious instrument in that barrel chest of his. And that instrument is the reason his voice carried through three cinderblock dorm room walls to disturb his neighbors. One of the occupational hazards of having that kind of lung capacity is that you don’t always recognize when you’re emitting sound waves strong enough to knock out a musk ox.

I’ve been asked to lower my voice at least twice a week since I was a small child. Not in a nasty way or anything. But there were many occasions when I was asked to stop shouting when, from my own perspective, I obviously wasn’t, and it did happen often enough that I’m still pretty sensitive about it. Case in point: just yesterday, I was dropping something off at my parents’ house and was standing in the living room talking to my mother, and one of my brothers made a comment to the effect that he already had a migraine before I started talking. I may or may not have stomped out of the house.

Granted, things did get better for me once we all understood that, in my mother’s words, I have “Richard Zeller lungs.” In other words: my inherent volume issue it not just an obnoxious and useless personal trait. It’s an obnoxious personal trait which ensures that, most of the time, my voice reaches every seat in the house without a microphone. When the house is a theater or a church, this is a spectacular asset. It is a slightly less spectacular asset when the house is somebody’s actual house… especially when one of the residents of that house already had a migraine.

Another of the stories I’ve heard my dad tell is Grace Paley’s The Loudest Voice. In it, the loudest voice belongs to Shirley Abramowitz, a young Jewess cast as the narrator in her grade school’s Christmas pageant (because of her particularly resonant instrument) much to her mother’s consternation. There’s a scene wherein her father says to her mother, “Does it hurt Shirley to learn to speak up? It does not… she’s not a fool.” To which Shirley replies, albeit not aloud, “I thank you, Papa, for your kindness. It is true about me to this day. I am foolish but I am not a fool.”

I can’t help being naturally resonant. I can’t help being a bit foolish. But I try not to be an all-out fool. So about ten seconds after stomping out of the house, I went back and tried to patch things up… and lower my voice. Well. I did at least manage to patch things up. But rather than get discouraged at my inability to modulate my volume, I am making a choice right now to be grateful that my big voice, like Shirley Abramowitz’s, will soon be used to tell a story—a story that deserves to be told out loud. 

Let Nothing You Dismay

God rest ye, merry gentlemen

Let nothing you dismay

Remember, Christ our Savior

Was born on Christmas Day

To save us all from Satan’s power

When we were gone astray

Oh, tidings of comfort and joy;

Comfort and joy

Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.

My first paid singing gig ever is a month away. I’ve been hired to sing a dozen Christmas songs arranged especially for me by Jimmy Mac (who is the best ever) at my uncle’s church in Palm Desert. I will be, essentially, a headliner. Three hundred people will have nothing to watch or listen to but me… for forty-five minutes.

I’m just the tiniest little bit… terrified.

Don’t get me wrong. Performing is nothing new to me. I started singing in the eighth grade when, for no reason except that it sounded fun to me, I joined the school choir and went out for the spring musical. What I found out years after the fact was that this caused something of a stir with my family, who had no idea that I had a voice. But they never said anything until long afterwards, and the question of whether or not I could sing was not on my mind when I signed up.

That year I was voted choir president and got a lead in the musical, and I’ve been studying voice privately ever since (with a few breaks between teachers). I learned to bend my knees and elongate my neck and never move my shoulders when I breathe. I’ve played Fantine in a youth production of Les Miserablés, a nun in The Sound of Music in college, and, this past year, was a Narrator in a community theater production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I sang second alto in college choir and first soprano in church choir. I’ve sung in churches, schools, and theatres, as well as at weddings, memorial services, and once even a naval pinning ceremony.

All this to say: this isn’t my first rodeo, but I’ve never had to hold an audience’s interest on my own for this long. I’ve never had to come up with clever and engaging things to say between songs before. And I don’t have the kind of gregarious, larger-than-life, rock star personality that thrives in that kind of an environment.

After I agreed to do the Palm Desert gig—and after Jimmy agreed to play with me—the whole thing snowballed. What started out as “show up at our church and sing for us” quickly became three gigs, plus an album (In the Bleak Midwinter, available for purchase December 2013) and even something vaguely resembling a marketing and branding campaign. I’ve got coordinated fonts and images and art (designed by AlarmCat, which is the best ever); a carefully thought out CD table, mailing lists, emailing lists, a Facebook page, this blog, and a mongoose whose pelt has been genetically engineered to match the album art. Okay, maybe not that, but the rest of it is true. God help me, I’m even considering joining Twitter.

And then, about a month ago, as I made lists and wrote emails and spent hours in Jimmy’s studio recording, panic started bubbling up in me. I thought, “What am I doing here? I’m approaching this as though I have something to say to these people; something to offer them. I have nothing to say. Everyone is going to get there and take one look at me and know I’m a poser. Merciful God, why did I sign up for all this?!”

Then, about a week ago, I went to church with a friend and Jimmy Needham played during the service. He was onstage less than ten minutes. He spent about two of those minutes talking and played two songs and then he was done, and when the service was over, I all but ran to his CD table, paid no attention whatsoever to the way it was laid out, and bought every album he had to offer. I almost bought one of those rubber bracelet things too, but I managed to remind myself in time that those things look trashy on me and so saved myself the $5.00.

Why did I do this? Jimmy Needham has a great voice and excellent musicianship, but so do lots of other people. That wasn’t why. The reason I ran outside and dropped $35.00 for five CDs—an extravagant buy for a woman who takes eons to get into new music—lies within the two minutes he stood there talking. I started out listening to him thinking, “Good, this is good; maybe I can figure out from this guy how to talk to a crowd between songs.” But I forgot about picking up speaking tips approximately ten seconds later—not because Jimmy Needham is the last word in eloquence, but because he made me feel so comfortable in my own skin. He wasn’t some big rock star. He was just a guy talking about an experience he had—trying to earn God’s approval by doing stuff, failing miserably, and then realizing, oh, right; that’s not how this works—and then singing a song about it. He was gentle, soft-spoken, unassuming, and had me on the edge of tears in under two minutes.

Walking to the car with my friend, I realized that I had been thinking about this all wrong. Christmas music might well be my favorite music of all time. It is immensely meaningful to me and I get no end of pleasure from singing it—in the car, in the shower, on stage; it doesn’t matter. I love it. I do not need to approach any of these gigs in schmooze mode. All I have to do is stand up straight (with slightly bent knees and a long neck and unmoving shoulders) say, briefly, why I love the song I’m about to sing, and then sing it.

My mother put it this way. “If you can stand there and love people, you won’t need to do anything else.”

I may not be rock star material. But with the right help, I think I can do that much. And if nothing else, I know that if I remember why I’m there, I’ll be much less dismayed.