Word: singeing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Particularly in this rare and indestructible Stradivarius; there is no one else alive who can sing like Hunter. The second she steps on a stage, it becomes a time machine, and her audience is transported to an era most people know only from scratchy records, the age of the great blues singers: Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and, of course, Alberta Hunter. So small and fragile that she looks as if she would be tossed head over heels by the giant hoop earrings she always wears, Hunter never belts out a song. Instead, she unwraps it, slowly and artfully. Her voice...
...changes the words to suit her mood and the audience's. "The minute I hit the floor, I know what kind of audience I have," she says. "If I see they don't know what it's all about, I'll sing things I know they like, like On the Sunny Side of the Street. But if I see they're sophisticated, I'll sing something like / Travel Alone, which Noel Coward wrote for me. I seldom sing it because the home folks wouldn't know what I was talking about...
Fortunately, she started out with sophisticated and very tough audiences. Born in Memphis, where her mother was a maid in a whorehouse and her father a Pullman porter, she always knew she wanted to sing. When Alberta was still a child, she ran away to Chicago, where, she had heard, singers could make $10 a week. She was helped by a friend of the family and, after making a pest of herself, was finally given a chance to sing at Dago Frank's, a saloon where prostitutes and pimps hung...
Dunster and Mather Houses, coming out for tradition, will host their annual sing-in December 15, presenting the single piece most consistently associated with the Christmas season: Handel's Messiah. It's often forgotten that this glorious oratorio was composed at an entirely unseasonal time of year, and traces the whole life of Christ, not just the Nativity. But who cares--all those baroque flourishes suggest nothing if not Christmas trees, and the chorus praising, "God, who doth make Intercession for us" is as mercifully timely as ever. A Week of Music Back Society Orchestra: Sanders Theatre Saturday 12/11...
Larger-scale audience-participation comes with another seasonal anomaly--the proliferation of "Sing-Ins," in which audiences buy or bring scores to a performance and sight-read the chorus under the direction of host-provided conductors. The most unusual such event this may come at Currier House on Sunday, as concert-planners hope to include a sight-singing of Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols in a performance by the Currier Singers...