Twice a month a group of about 30 Iowa City residents gathered, not to perform but to participate in a time-honored tradition: singing together as a community.
Iowa City Community Sing, formed a decade ago, is part of a larger movement of community singing — a practice that brings people together to share songs in an open, informal setting welcoming all voices without the need for musical training or performance pressure.
“One beauty of the group is that we’re not professional musicians. We’re not performing,” Andy Douglas, a nine-year member, said. “We just do it for the love of it.”
Douglas explained that Iowa City Community Sing is unique from other community singing groups in its decentralized structure where there is no set song leader, but rather any member or drop-in participant who wants to lead a song is welcome to.
“It feels good to be a group that’s not hierarchical,” Douglas said. “It fits with the spirit of what we’re doing, which is building community.”
Douglas’ wife, Carol Tyx, also a nine-year member, said the group meets twice a month and saw an unusually large turnout at their session on the weekend following the election.
“Everybody’s got a lot of feelings about the election,” Tyx said. “And I think it was hopeful to express those through song.”
The events are what members refer to as a “sing.” At a recent sing, the group opened and closed with “Lead with Love” by Melanie DeMore. The call-and-response folk song speaks to resilience in times of struggle, urging listeners to “put one foot in front of the other” and find strength through love and togetherness.
Karen Charney, another nine-year member, said the group has formed a community that has grown more meaningful and powerful than simply the music.
“There have been friendships formed; we have potlucks sometimes,” Charney said. “We’ve also come together in smaller groups when somebody needs a sing.”
One of these smaller groups, Heartsong, gathers to support people in times of transition or healing, offering comfort and joy through shared song. Charney explained this often involves a few members visiting someone’s home during moments of change — be it sickness, surgery, loss, or birth — bringing the uplifting power of song to those who need it most.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the group also held regular sings at the University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children’s Hospital, welcoming patients, families, and staff, with the event also live-streamed to patient rooms for those unable to attend in person.
Charney said the group focuses on songs with messages of hope, healing, and empowerment — messages that felt especially powerful at Saturday’s sing but resonate well beyond it.
“I love the message of all the songs,” Charney said. “Not even talking about this week, when we need it so much, but we always need it.”
For Lyndsey Scott, this year’s Grant Wood Fellow of Interdisciplinary Performance at the UI and a friend of Iowa City Community Sing, community singing is one of humanity’s oldest and most powerful ways to foster a sense of togetherness — and it’s seeing a resurgence.
“Just like yoga studios have grown in popularity over the last number of decades, so are groups getting together to sing for the purpose of relaxing, of building village, of deepening relationships,” Scott said. “So the movement is growing.”
RELATED: Iowa City Poetry hosts Mic Check Poetry Festival
As part of her fellowship, Scott teaches a course in the UI’s music department called “Community Singing for Collective Power,” where students explore the roots of community singing in social movements and its role as a unifying, healing practice. They brought this to life with a community event, “Singing for Sanity,” held on the Friday after the election.
“Singing together in a circle in this way invites us to attune to each other, which is an important step in remembering that we belong to each other,” Scott said. “Which, looking around at current events, there’s so much othering and so much fear of the enemy.”
After four years of touring the U.S. and exploring the growing community singing movement, Scott applied for the UI’s Grant Wood Fellowship on a whim. When she was accepted, she felt she already had a home with Iowa City Community Sing.
“I always like visiting their group because it is so communal and supporting,” Scott said. “They’ve developed a lot of mutual aid over the years, and there they were part of why I felt excited to move here because they’re so welcoming.”
Douglas said he was happy to see the high turnout at Saturday’s sing, which drew a younger crowd than the group’s regular 20 members. He hopes to see more young people get involved in the joy and power of community singing.
“We would love for it to become a much more intergenerational project,” Douglas said.