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Monday, April 21, 2008

Young At Heart Chorus

Why haven't I heard about this group before? They're great! They being The Young At Heart Chorus, a musical group that:

    ...began in 1982 the members all lived in an elderly housing project in Northampton, MA called the Walter Salvo House. The first group included elders who lived through both World Wars. One of our members had fought in the Battle of the Somme as a 16 year old and another, Anna Main, lost her husband in the First World War. Anna was a stand-up comic who at 88 told jokes that only she could get away with. She sang with us until she was 100.

    [...]

    The current performers in Young@Heart range in age from 72 to 88. There are some with prior professional theater or music experience, others who have performed extensively on the amateur level, and some who never stepped onto a stage before turning eighty. None of the current performers of Y@H were part of the original group that formed in 1982, but they have kept alive the spirit of the early pioneers and continue to push the group into glorious new directions.

The guy in the white suit in the first video - ala John Travolta - is Fred Knittle whose voice is off-the-charts fantastic. Mr. Knittle suffers from congestive heart failure, but you'd never know it by his voice.

If you can find it with adequate volume, check out Knittle's version of Coldplays "Fix You" on the internet, it is fantastic. The Knittle videos I've seen all had rather low audio volume - not bad quality audio - not just loud enough. This one is the best I ran across.

The first selection below is the group's rendition of the Bee Gees "Stayin' Alive" / Gloria Gaynor "I Will Survive" medley --- and it's great!



The below video is the Young At Heart Chorus' version of the Talking Heads hit "Road To Nowhere."



And here's another performance that is a MUST SEE, the link to the Y@HC version of the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated."

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