We’ve landed at the historic Yorktowne Hotel in York, Pennsylvania, and we’re going to have a day of rest before heading into Washington on Monday and Tuesday for the Inauguration celebrations. And I need the rest- I got a stupid cold the day before we left, and by our workshop this morning my voice was not so much my own. I am choosing to be steadfastly convinced that it will return to me before the historic events!

Our concert last night in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was the perfect beginning to this journey. We had the great pleasure of a very receptive and generous audience, on whose articulate faces we could read impassioned response. Recessing down the main aisle of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church through that parted sea of faces nearly floored me. Several of us had been moved nearly to tears at different parts of the program.

And this morning we had the good fortune to revisit some of those same faces in a more relaxed, workshop setting. The audience was lively and full of insightful comments and questions, and Brainerd punctuated the discussion by leading the choir and participants in traditional spirituals (now everyone in the choir seems to want a copy of the hymnbook).

Towards the end of the workshop, a woman in the audience began to speak. She started to thank us, and couldn’t go on. Brainerd moved into the pew to give her a hug, and Carolyn came down from the altar steps to share her tissues. A few minutes later, someone suggested we all sing “We Shall Overcome”. That totally did it for me. I was reminded of our concert in December, the benefit for Grandmothers to Grandmothers and the Stephen Lewis Foundation. The church was packed to the rafters, and we concluded the concert with that same song. It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to get caught up in the potent history of that song, especially in a time as momentous as this past Presidential election. So this morning, I sang approximately two notes of We Shall Overcome, before I was, um, overcome. Carolyn turned around to comfort me. I asked her later if she’d done so because she heard me stop singing, and she said no, she just knew I was crying.

I was talking to Brainerd about it while eating suspicious chicken tenders at our truck stop dinner. I said “I am going to have to get it together before Washington, or I won’t be able to sing a note!” I was thinking back to my very first rehearsal with the Chorale, when I cried all upanddown the front of my shirt sighreading “Truth Pressed to Earth Shall Rise” for the first time. The words of Martin Luther King Jr. leapt off the page: “At the center of non-violence is the power of love. So if we must choose a weapon, let it only be love. Power at its best is love.” Those words MOVED me: not just to tears, but in a very physical way, in a way they were designed to. Those words are a call to action. They’re liberating not just in a political sense but in a personal sense: King saw the human person’s dignity, and what he saw was very good. We sang “Truth Pressed to Earth” all through our fall tour through the Southern States, during the election campaign, when for the first time in a long time we were hearing a politician talking about universal hope. Now we’re about to sing in Washington on Inauguration Day.

Brainerd said exactly what I expected him to say when I voiced my worry about weeping my way through history being made. “If you’re moved, let yourself be moved”, he said. We’d spent the morning speaking about how the music we sing is so deeply connected to the body, to labour and struggle and movement. He reminded us to sway in order to really internalize the music as we sang.

Brainerd always asks us to sing from our core, and he invites us to offer our full voices in all their uniqueness, as unique as the bodies we’re rooted in. Making the performance so personal is at the heart of Chorale has come here to offer: a musical tradition marked by political and social struggle, rooted in the depths of human experience. Making music like this is the simplest and best thing we can offer, because it’s an offering of the self. There is no response more appropriate to the kind of experience we are about to encounter than to let ourselves be moved.