If you ask Eveline MacDougall how her Amandla Chorus came to be on Jan. 31, 1988, she’ll tell you it was a case of serendipity.
As a 23-year-old new Greenfield resident, MacDougall was hosting a meeting of the Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters. While getting snacks together, MacDougall found herself humming a South African freedom song she learned while living on a communal farm in Winchendon Springs.
“(Rosie Heidkamp) was walking by me and she just stopped in her tracks,” MacDougall, now 53, remembered. “She said ‘Where did you learn that song?’”
Heidkamp, it turned out, had lived in South Africa, where the same tune had drifted from black churches. She asked MacDougall to teach the music to her and a few friends, organizing a rehearsal in Wendell, where she is now library director.
“Rosie and a few of her friends turned into 40 people!” MacDougall exclaimed of the Jan. 31 get-together. “Cars upon cars just started lining up.”
MacDougall, who missed the songs herself, had prepared an hour of material, but it seemed her pupils’ appetite for music was insatiable.
“They didn’t wanna leave, so we sang for three hours,” she said. MacDougall promised to hold another session in two weeks, a tradition that has carried on for three decades.
“It just snowballed,” MacDougall said. “I had no clue it was going to turn into a chorus.”
Today, the chorus has about 45 members, ages 11 to 84, who come from southern Vermont down to Northampton, and from Shelburne Falls out to the North Quabbin.
“It’s sort of a magical formula to me that people just keep coming,” said MacDougall, founder and artistic director of the group.
There almost seemed to be an element of magic in Temple Israel in Greenfield on Jan. 30, when the Amandla Chorus opened up its rehearsal to the community.
After warming up with a variety of stretches, kooky vocal exercises and tongue-twisters, the chorus began making up verses to “This Little Light of Mine,” from “’Til health care is free for all” and “When women in November win.” The audience, keeping with the beat, joined in clapping, singing and contributing lyrics.
When one volunteered, “When we reach across the aisle, I’m gonna let it shine,” men and women acted out the words. They held their pew neighbors’ hands and embraced each other with outstretched arms.
Meanwhile, the singers — the sopranos, altos, tenors and basses — encircled the room until everyone felt surrounded by their uplifting melody in its deep and high variations. More than 30 voices seemed to become one.
“Amandla has really enriched my life in so many ways,” said 20-year chorus member Joanne Gold of Florence. “It’s a chance to be part of a vibrant, caring community.”
Being a member of the chorus, Gold said, helped her use song to cope with the death of both her parents, while also allowing her to share a love of music with her daughter, 23-year-old Sadie Gold-Shapiro of Northampton.
Gold-Shapiro was an Amandla member as a 4-year-old in her mother’s arms, leading the music to become engrained in her memories. She celebrated birthday after birthday with the chorus, who always sang the Japanese children’s song Hotaru Koi at her request and learned songs she picked up in school.
“It really felt like it was a second family,” Gold-Shapiro said, adding that the members are joined across generations. “When something happens, we’re all there for each other.”
Gold-Shapiro said that while she never thought of herself as a singer, she stayed on with the chorus “to hone her skills in a supportive community.” But another part of the attraction was singing in other languages, which Gold-Shapiro believes gave her the “chance to step inside other cultures.”
“It feels like a real way to connect in a fragmented world,” she said.
“These songs have been calling cards for me to meet people from all over the world,” agreed MacDougall, who even met her partner, Doug Reid, at an Amandla Chorus rehearsal in 2009. “It becomes a different kind of passport, an entry point I never would have anticipated.”
Over the years, the Amandla Chorus has sung in prisons, preschools and day cares, nursing homes, hospitals and homeless shelters; its members have sung to veterans, patients, inmates and children. For Gold, singing for inmates has been one of the most memorable experiences.
“It’s intense to sing for people everybody else has forgotten,” Gold said.
As such, the Amandla Chorus, MacDougall said, primarily sings songs that voice unity and determination, celebrate diversity and “express the power of regular people.”
“Those people who keep putting one foot in front of the other are the ones that are the most inspirational to me,” she said, adding that singing together can transcend culture’s hierarchies.
At its inception, the group had no name, but the desire to perform in concert led members to ask the question “What do we call ourselves?” A member who was from South Africa suggested “amandla” which means “power” in Zulu, a word that MacDougall said seemed to fit the group and its work perfectly.
After about a year, MacDougall said, the group branched out from singing freedom songs from South Africa, noticing that so much music could be tied to oppression in the United States as well. Today, its members also sing original music written by MacDougall, a venture she took on in 2000, following a series of miscarriages.
“In order to keep myself sane, I had to pump up my creative energy,” she said. “Somehow, that parlayed into writing a whole bunch of songs.”
The group’s big break, she said, came when the Traprock Center for Peace & Justice invited the chorus to perform at a benefit headlined by folk singer-songwriter Tom Paxton.
“It just kind of launched us into going more public,” she said.
After that, MacDougall received an unexpected call in 1990 asking the chorus to perform in Boston as part of a celebratory concert for Nelson Mandela, the famed South African leader who’d just been released from 27 years of prison.
“I literally thought one of my singers was pulling my leg,” she remembered, describing the concert as an intense bonding experience for the singers.
Other notable concerts have been held for Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Cesar Chavez and Nobel Prize-winner Malala Yousafzai.
Looking back over 30 years as the Amandla Chorus artistic director, MacDougall said the chorus’ fortunate evolution “all just kind of happened.”
“My life has just been serendipity after serendipity,” she said.
MacDougall is writing a book about how her early life experiences set her on a path as Amandla Chorus founder, and how the group formed. She plans to release the book in September or October.
The chorus’ serendipitous growth, MacDougall said, makes it difficult for her to imagine what the future might bring.
“It feels like I’m not writing this script,” she said. “But I want us to continue to bring songs of justice and freedom to all sectors of the community, open minds and just keep singing. Through that, we’ll watch other people get empowered.”