Anne Hampton Callaway

Yesterday while driving about town I tuned in SiriusXM's "Siriusly Sinatra" channel (71) and happened to catch a tune sung by an extraordinary interpreter.  The radio-screen only gave me "Ann Hampton Cal" (it was an old screen), and then the Sinatra channel moved on to something sung by the King.

Imagine my delight at today's PowerLine essay (with Pictures and Sound!!) on Ann Hampton Callaway.  Surely co-incidence, except there is No Such Thing as Co-incidence....

Anyhow.

If you want to hear an art-singer sing from the Great American Songbook, punch the 'play' button on "I'll Be Seeing You."  As we have repeated, repeated, repeated, in genuine art-music, whether "sacred" or "secular", the TEXT is primary; the music illuminates that text so that they become one, not two, entities.  Callaway knows that; she's quoted in the essay linked above....

...When I spoke to her in 2008 Ann quoted Andre Gide: “Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.” For Ann, that says it all: singing is a spiritual experience. “I feel a strong sense of grace when I perform,” she says, a sense she first felt when listening to Leontyne Price. “She is a vessel. That’s what I want to be.”...

She's from the Chicago area.  (Nobody's perfect.)  She is also part of the Most Politically Correct bunch, which is not a big surprise.