Hi Penelope,

From what I heard from singers/teachers friends of mine, the first step is to help the student let go of his inhibitions and teach him to scream effectively, let go and discover thus his own voice and power. As a woman, one feels sometimes more at ease being taught by another woman, as singing lessons are about being body conscious. So the first step is to find a person you trust and feel comfortable with and all the rest will come later. A great thing about singing, is that if the choice of the teacher is good, in the sense that the way she teaches technique suits your voice and body well, then the improvement can be quite fast, and you’ll be able to sing soon beautiful arias, and not only alone under the shower.

Hi Penelope,

I play guitar and sing in a (purely avocational) blues-based band that performs within a 100-mile radius of my home. This is likely not the kind of singing you're thinking of, but I have learned some things that echo Edna's advice. Singing, at first, is a matter of letting go. For me, this involved letting go of my "natural" voice. Speaking, I sound very much like white-guy-who-grew-up-in-a-cul-de-sac. If I sing with my natural voice, I sound very much the same. I had to learn to growl (we're talking about the blues), sing in a lower register, sing from the back of my mouth, and so forth. At first, I felt as if I was faking singing--singing in someone else's voice. After awhile I understood the voice was mine. There was no man behind the curtain. What one discovers is that the voice is an instrument, and you have to learn to play it, and play with it. This can entail lessons, or if you're just singing in a blues band, learning how to growl in the shower. You also have to learn control and, depending on your ambitions, technique, but first is letting go. By the way, when I was in a high school play long ago in a role that called for singing a song, the director cut the song out of my part after telling me I was tone deaf. I can sing (just the blues, but singing just the same) anybody can.

Thanks to both of you for the encouragement and for the stories.

I admit your answers surprised me. I hadn't really considered this to be an issue of allowing something to be expressed or revealed, but it's a very interesting point: I will have to begin then by shouting in the shower next time no one else is home.

What surprised me also was the idea that singing might somehow be a natural form of expression, and that one becomes uncomfortable with one's singing just as one often becomes uncomfortable with one's body, throwing over it a kind of protective cloak of self-consciousness.