Keira WitherKay wrote:
always wondered why more vocalists just think it's a natural gift..........
But this does seem to be a thing in white, westernised culture now. People think that someone is able to sing, while someone else is not, like someone has blue eyes and someone else has brown. It's an absurd result of so little singing going on in our culture. The fact that I could sing well enough to make it into school choirs was the result of singing along to beatles, buddy holly, and Elvis records as a small child. I practised. I also noticed that my ma would sing in the car - so it seemed like something you could do for your own entertainment.
My brother, on the other hand, would almost never sing. Or if he did, he wouldn't do it confidently enough to have any chance of hitting the notes. So now he can't sing at all.
I'm personally not a fan of church, but one thing it was really good for was maintaining a singing culture. In my work, meetings in rural clinics often start with complete strangers singing praise hymns in freakin'
four part harmony! Total strangers. Never sung together. This is largely the result, imo, of a church culture in which there are typically no instruments. There's no organ dominating where it takes the centre and everybody just sings the main melody.
I once met an old Welsh man floating in the Mediterranean Sea. As we bobbed there, he told me how he remembered his father and brothers coming up the hill from the mines, all pitch black, singing fit to blow the tiles off the rooftops. Closing the mines has killed both Welsh rugby and Welsh harmony singing.
Having lost this in our culture, we now assume that singing is an innate talent that is encoded in our genes. And maybe that helps untrained singers to thing that that's all there is to it. If you can sing, your work is done. And maybe then you are not even aware that you can make mistakes with materiel that's in a bad key for you, or takes you out of your usual comfort zone.
And this conversation is only really talking about the extreme - not making certain notes. We're not even talking about the proliferation of vocalists with weak, reedy, characterless voices - thinking of Viccy's projection remarks. I heard a middle-aged blues band a few months back and thought, "No one will get the blues listening to this band. The vocals just make this seem like really light-weight, white-bread music. There's no pain here. There's no sorrow." You don't need to have experienced those things to put them into your singing. Just listen to Tom Waits. It's a character that he plays when he sings. So is Mick Jagger. Your voice needs to perform - express something, even if it's using a classically based approach like Joan Baez's.
