This article was originally published in February 2020.
Some friends and I recently went to karaoke. You can likely picture the scene: a restaurant adjacent to a bowling alley with a cheerful crowd and enthusiastic DJ aiming lights at a small stage. We sang a popular duet, Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooperâs âShallow,â to the roomâs applause, and I remembered how good it felt to sing into a microphone.
It brought me back to my time as a music teacher in the late 2000s in my home state of Kentucky. Like all of us, my students had their own preferences in terms of the styles and genres they liked to sing, but of course there were the mainstays that we all had to learn â for example, the national anthem, which we practiced as soloists and as a multi-part choir. We often sang spontaneously, too, belting out âHappy Birthdayâ if someone was celebrating theirs on a rehearsal day.