What is Y’all Sing?
Y'all Sing! is a drop in choir in San Antonio, Texas. We pick a popular song (think karaoke tunes from folks like Tina Turner, Ricky Martin, Three Non Blondes) and listen to the song before we arrive. At the door, we receive a lyric sheet, learn the song in 3 part harmony together, and then we film our creation, all in less than 2 hours!
November 2024 Song: “After The Gold Rush” by Neil Young
The mission of Y'all Sing! is:
To connect and harmonize folks of all walks of life—bodies of every ability, age, color, creed, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, socioeconomic background, and beyond—through a love of singing.
To demonstrate that anyone who loves to sing, no matter how they think they sound, belongs and has a place in the choir (instead of putting them to the side or telling them to mouth the words, our practice for folks who identify with wanting to improve their tuning is to bring them into the center of the group, so they can hear and absorb the tuning of the other practiced voices. With this support, over time, our tuning naturally improves. It’s how human voices work!)
To create a relationships with, and raise awareness of, and funds for under-served folks and situations in need while mindfully drawing attention to the underpinning structures that perpetuate that need (we are currently growing towards this).
Our Y’all Sing! Story
When Olivia worked as a choir director at a school in Argentina, one of her colleagues introduced her to the videos of Choir!Choir!Choir! (CCC), a drop-in choir based in Ontario, Canada. Inspired by CCC, Olivia and colleagues spent the next year creating opportunities for the school community—students, parents, teachers, staff, and their families—to sing together. The largest group to gather was over 500 people singing Hey Jude by the Beatles in 4 part harmony. Getting to guide 500 people in joyfully singing, then bursting into cheers for themselves and hugs at the end is one of the best things Olivia has ever experienced!
Seeing how easily folks took to the process (including those who weren’t as comfortable singing with others), noting how much fun everyone had and how spontaneously they tended to celebrate this kind of unified achievement, Olivia was determined to continue to gather folks to sing regularly. Olivia returned to the US in 2017 and the first Y’all Sing! was held in 2018 at The Friendly Spot in Southtown, San Antonio. The event got covered by Texas Public Radio and was a wonderful success (see the first video at the top of this page for that recording. Watch to the end—note the similar cheers and high-fives!). Olivia continued to lead both drop-in and workshop singing experiences for folks until taking a pause for COVID-19.
As of July 2021, Y’all Sing! is beginning again slowly, singers gathering outdoors and distanced in order to mitigate the spread of COVID, while also allowing folks to come together during a time where we all need a dose of beauty and a sense of belonging in our lives more than ever. Our mission, credo, and vision have grown as we continue to awaken to what humans need to live whole-heartedly in these paradoxically familiar and unprecedented times.
Our Credo: At Y’all Sing!, we believe in the essential goodness and capacity of human beings as well as the healing ability of human body-minds. We believe that trauma and systems of oppression are at the root of our dissonance as a species. We believe we do not need to run from these phenomena, but that we can meet them with curiosity. We believe that gathering as a community focused on presence through singing, on co-regulating our collective nervous system and supporting one another from that regulated space is where this goodness and healing can emerge to transform our relationship to trauma.
Our Vision: Allow us to get really deep for a second. As humans, we often need reminding or pointers back to our essential selves, that sense of peace from which we all come and lives within us. When we sing together, our breathing and our heartbeats align. There is no better way than singing to experience an embodied sense of harmony, of beautifully and purposefully different parts coming together to make a whole. This harmony sets a perfect stage for minds to quiet, bodies to sync, and hearts to open and connect . Over time, like replanting an old growth forest, this harmonization yields a certain culture—with the effects of oppressive systems being faced and becoming uprooted, the energy that has sustained their growth is now free to feed and make space for belonging, joy, and freedom to bloom. It is from this regulated space, this unshakable sense of home, that we sustainably and symbiotically serve each other and the world.
*Learn about how showing up continually in a collective to harmonize our bodies is a component of releasing symptoms of systemic oppression, specifically regarding racial trauma, at Resmaa Menakem’s webpage.