Skip to main content

Singing Like an Old Lady

Aretha belts it out!


Singing like an Old Lady.  

My voice has changed ... 

... but I'm not alone in this.

I love to sing, but my training was long ago when I was in high school and college.  I learned to be true to the pitch, to use my diaphragm, to pay attention to my breathing, to be dynamic with my volumes and to be respectful of the song.  It was classical training, albeit at a student level.  When I met my current partner Dan, a professional musician, a few years ago, he was eager to have me sing with him, especially in public.

A person can sing all day long at home or in the studio, but a singer needs to sing in public in order to improve, he would tell me. He's a great musician and a great mentor and because of him I've gotten up in front of audiences (in wine bars, after I've had a little wine myself) and I've been received pretty well by friends and other wine drinkers. 

But he has recorded me a few times, and I hear things I don't hear while I'm up there at the mic.

I am 67 now and I sound like an old lady.  

My vibrato is not controlled, and although I have always been proud of my pitch, hearing the recordings made me aware that I am no longer in control some of the time, and I hadn't realized that.  Today I listened to a recording from earlier this week, and I felt so embarrassed.

Should I stop singing?  Or should I embrace my love of singing and continue to"share my voice with the world," (as more than one of my dear friends has encouraged)?

I spent the next few hours after hearing this recording (of a Joni Mitchell song I dared to sing, fulfilling a long-held dream of mine to sing one of her tunes) thinking bad thoughts about myself. 

How dare I stand up in front of people and subject them to my flaws?
How dare I even attempt a difficult song like "Little Green?" What was I thinking?
If I am going to sound like the grandmother I am, I should only sing "old lady" songs.
Let's just keep my love of singing to lullabies I sing to my grandchildren; they love them.

Then I googled "I sound like an old lady" and I came up with this 2014 article about Aretha Franklin.  The headline knocked me out:
Here's the YouTube of Aretha's performance (corrected from the first day of this post when I had it wrong!)

https://youtu.be/mvjS8qjqrqQ

ABSOLUTELY:  Good for her!!

Apparently this  rendition of Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" she sang on Letterman's show was so controversial people's responses fell into either "love it" or "hate it".  The article's author, Rich Juzwiak, described her voice thus:  

"Aretha Franklin's voice used to soar, seemingly without effort, but sometimes now she audibly gets caught on hurdles when she goes for the big jumps. Her upper range often sounds strained and threadbare. If it were a piece of cloth, you'd be able to see through most of it by this point. But whatever. Her attempts on Letterman were audacious, there's still plenty of power in those pipes, still enough of that Aretha growl to satisfy many of us who consider her voice to be one of America's greatest natural resources."

What he wrote about her "threadbare" upper range resonated with my fears about my own voice, and he also wrote, 

"Franklin hit some sour notes that night. It was far from the flawless performance that pop culture's pageant-perfect reigning contemporary diva Beyoncé has us used to hearing. If it were an American Idol audition, Franklin might not have made it through to Hollywood."

I laughed then, because I had said the same thing to Dan this morning after hearing myself, that if I was a contestant on Idol or the Voice I wouldn't have made it past three notes before they sent me packing.

Then Juzwiak continued:

"But man, what gusto the 72-year-old exhibited. What risk she took. She could have sung the entire song in her comfortable middle register, as she did mostly during the verses. This would have been safer and more likely to have earned her praise from across the board, but it also would have been boring. Instead she unleashed and went wild, opting for an abrasive octave jump during the song's pre-chorus section."

Well, ok then!  That's what Dan tells me all the time:  that my main problem is confidence.
That I hold back and I should take the risks and not worry about perfection.  
That keeping my voice to myself is kinda selfish.  

Even at my age.  

So, ok.  I won't use ageism against myself to silence myself.  What the heck.  If I stand up and sing and the wino's applaud me despite my flaws, there's something they like.  

Maybe it's just the fact that I stand up and sing at all that brings their applause.  
Maybe if I do,  more others will too.   

I ain't no Aretha Franklin, not by a million miles and never was, but maybe even I can be a role model here in my little town.

Comments

  1. GraceMarch 31, 2018 at 8:12 PM

    Here's to wild abandon and pushing through fear. In your worst performance you'll definitely sound better than 90% of us who were never trained and don't have a clue about diaphragm control and perfect pitch. You're singing not only is a role model but it frees each of us to be joyous and not care (that much) about what others might think. Many things change as we age, being wild and raising our voices in joyous song doesn't need to be given up, covered up or silenced. Sing on!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated before posting, generally within 24 hours.

Popular posts from this blog

The Seasons of a Woman: Harvest Queen

Harvest Queen  The  Harvest Queen  represents the Autumn Equinox, also known as the celebration of Mabon.  The light and the dark are in balance on the equinox, and as the days unfold the darkness begins to overcome the light.  We celebrate our harvests, and then come the days of contemplation.  Wisdom emerges from our depths into our conscious minds, and if we fully accept this upwelling of knowing from within, we enter a time of new strength, preparing ourselves as we become, day by day, one who understands grace.    Celebrating the Autumn Equinox    She who has matured through her seasons, from infancy and childhood to maiden, thence to mother, and as she ascends her Autumn Throne, her crops are fully grown.  She has earned her crown. The left half of the painting represents the end of summer, and the fullness of nature, and that of a woman fully matured. The right half of the painting represents the beginning of autumn; the beginning of the fall ... the very beginning of the descen
Post a Comment
Read more

Becoming a Work of Art

Advanced Style:  Girls Just Wanna Have Fun! For many people of all ages that includes playing with one's presentation to the world, to friends, and to oneself.  Yet in our culture, women who are beyond their reproductive years are shamed into invisibility, retreating into clothes they were taught were more suitable for older women.  But not everyone succumbs to the idea that due to being older they should just shuffle off the stage of life, retreating to the comfort of sensible shoes, a cup of tea and the couch.   The photos on this page are from Advanced Style, the work of Ari Seth Cohen. To celebrate the sense of style of some stylish over-age-60 women he'd seen on the streets of NYC,  Cohen used his photography to focus on them and got to know many through interviews and repeated photo sessions.  He eventually published a book as well as a documentary about women who don't give up the self-expression they've enjoyed all their lives just because they are "ge
Post a Comment
Read more

The Shadow Self

  I'm exploring this concept at the request of Kathleen V., who is leading a Crone workshop in which I'm participating.  She asked whether I'd ever written about any aspect of my shadow self in my journaling over the years. I immediately thought of one experience I had in my early 20's.  I had just left a difficult relationship and had moved to a house with two friends near Bass Harbor, Maine.  The small house was rural, built above the rocky shore facing the harbor.  Behind it the forest rose up into the hills.   One winter night I was dropped off on the road.  As I trudged up the lonely driveway to the house through the snow I realized the house was empty.   I had not lived there long, and I had not been home alone before.  I kicked the snow from my boots and opened the kitchen porch door.  As is the case for many farm houses, the small enclosed back porch stored coats and boots and when the outer door was closed an inner door helped protect from the cold entering the
Post a Comment
Read more