Singing

I played the oboe as a girl. When I practiced, our family’s miniature dachshund would howl. I shut him in the kitchen at the opposite end of the house, but even then I occasionally heard him. I don’t know how my family stood the racket.

I didn’t even have to play: all I had to do was stand in front of the dog and put the reed near my lips, and he’d throw back his head and wail. I figured he was protesting the sound that hurt his ears, but sometimes it seemed we were harmonizing.

Decades later, my father gave me an audiotape he had secretly made of me practicing in my bedroom: held notes, then scales, then arpeggios for an entire half-hour. I was about to throw away the tape when I heard, faintly in the background, my beloved pet, singing with his entire body from across the house.

Beth Healy
Seattle, Washington

My first few weeks in jail were traumatic. Young and pregnant, I had trouble acclimating to the loud, raucous environment. The other inmates’ habits of sleeping during the day and talking all night didn’t help. Due to my high-risk pregnancy, I had my own cell, but the bars did nothing to keep out the yelling, laughing, and name-calling. 

Driven to tears by lack of sleep, I decided to sing softly to my unborn baby. I’d filched a hymnal from the church room, and when the lights went out and the noise started up, I began to sing a song I’d heard as a child in my grandfather’s country Baptist church. After a while I realized the noise had died down to a whisper. I panicked, thinking the other inmates were waiting for me to stop so they could make fun of my voice or my choice of church hymns instead of pop tunes. I sang the last notes of the song and paused.

After a few moments came a plaintive request: “Just one more?”

Sonya Reed
Gatesville, Texas

I met Murad in the summer of 2010, in Svaneti, a region of the Republic of Georgia. He and the other singers in the choir Ensemble Riho lived in villages at the base of the Caucasus Mountains, miles of snowcapped peaks that separated them from Russia. I was there with two other Americans to make recordings of some of the oldest folk songs in the area.

I hardly ever spoke directly to Murad, but he conveyed a feeling, a way of existing in the world. Even if he had tried to explain his music to me, I wouldn’t have understood; we didn’t speak each other’s language.

Foreigners who had come before us had given Murad a nickname: the “Rock Splitter,” for the volume of his singing. I expected a large, hairy-chested man, but he was slight and nimble, with ruddy cheeks and silvery eyes. Between recording takes at our makeshift studio, he would stare pensively into the distance. A farmer, he spent his days under the sun, and I got the sense that he was unaccustomed to being inside.

When Murad opened his mouth to sing, his neck veins bulged, and his stomach grew taut. His voice was loud but also remarkably graceful. Something other than sheer volume gave his music its strength. After several days of watching him and his fellow choir members sing thousand-year-old chants and centuries-old tales of war and survival, I decided Murad’s power lay in his ability to embody and transmit history. He was not singing about himself; he was transforming his body into a vessel for the music, for the past, for the many people who had sung before him. That widening of the neck, those big breaths, that steady stream of immense sound were all a negation of the self.

At its best, singing is a selfless act.

Sarah Gibson
Providence, Rhode Island

Most days my father kept to himself, quietly shuffling through our house, lost in thought, never looking up long enough to see me. By age ten I’d learned that the best way to make him smile was to sing a song in Farsi, especially in front of friends and family. Eyeing the expectant faces of my dad and his brothers, I’d take a deep breath and belt out “Daybaahlal.” The song’s lyrics were the only Farsi I knew. I was insecure and didn’t enjoy singing, but I did it so my dad, my baba, would be happy. When Baba was happy, a light seemed to spill from him, illuminating everyone.

Just as I’d sung the last note, Baba would beam and say, “See? There’s no accent. Can you believe it?” Then he would call me “ashenghem” — my dear — before slipping back into his thoughts.

When my father had first come to the United States, he’d been spit on as a foreigner. It wasn’t my singing that delighted him; it was hearing the language of our ancestors on my lips, untarnished by an American accent.

Azar K.
Denver, Colorado

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