TEXARKANA NATIVE HELPS YOUNG SINGERS FOLLOW THEIR DREAMS, GAIN RECOGNITION,
Texarkana native helps young singers follow their dreams, gain recognition
SHREVEPORT, La.—When you think of Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and similar crooners whose vocal beauty captured the essence of American culture through song, chances are such numbers are part of what’s considered the Great American Songbook.
It’s a canon of songs written by the likes of George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Fats Waller, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter and others. Combining strong melodies and smart lyrics, they’re enduring standards, often coming from jazz composers, Broadway shows and film scores. They originate from roughly the first half of the 20th century.
Even now, these songs are celebrated and recorded by contemporary singers, for example with a Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett collaborative album for which this cross-generational duo sang snazzy numbers like Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” and Porter’s “Anything Goes.”
Count Texarkana native Jennifer Dowd as a big fan of this music, so much so that she started a Shreveport-based nonprofit organization to promote the Great American Songbook and the opportunities for regional singers to both learn the craft of singing them and get connected to seasoned performers who’ve made a name in the industry with these songs.
Named Songbook South, the organization is an extension of Dowd’s work as a private voice teacher, a singer herself and middle school choir director.
“It encompasses all of those popular tunes during that time period,” Dowd said about what amounts to an eclectic body of work in the Great American Songbook repertoire. She likens these songbook numbers to little time capsules, such as the song “I’ll Be Seeing You,” which explores the theme of love during World War II when American and British soldiers left home and went overseas.
Dowd believes you can’t help but think of the spirit in which these songs were written and the time the lyrics describe.
“A lot of that music is historically connected,” she said. The songs combine wit with rich harmonies and complex melodic lines, she said. They also stand the test of time.
“First of all, it is a very diverse body of music. There’s a little bit of something in it for everyone,” Dowd said. From torchy blues songs to Broadway tunes and movie music, there’s something that’s bound to be accessible to a singer. And as for an education, there is much there to enrich a musical student’s development.
“It’s a very important body of work to our students,” Dowd said. While Songbook South students learn these songs locally with performance opportunities and weekend workshops and master classes, they also have a chance to take it further.
“We also have the ability to prepare them and help them should they wish to go on to a national competition,” Dowd said.
For Dowd, her appreciation for these songs and singing them has its roots in her time in Texarkana, getting involved in the arts through her public school education. She played violin and studied dance, sang in the church choir and participated in theater.
A Texas High graduate, Dowd went to Texarkana College for a couple of years, and this was around the same time TexRep’s artistic director Michael Cooper started teaching theater there. If a show involved singing, she was into it, she recalls. She also ushered at the Perot Theatre, which introduced her to cultural offerings, from ballets to symphonies.
“After I left Texarkana, I had a really great footing as an actress and a singer and a performer,” Dowd recalled. Later, she achieved degrees in vocal performance from Centenary College and Oklahoma City University. She studied classical music and opera.
And that experience she gained through education and her time learning the arts in Texarkana perhaps explains her inspiration for founding Songbook South. It’s about opportunity, too. She noticed students she met through her private vocal studio weren’t necessarily heading to competitions elsewhere, so she wondered why that wasn’t the case.
“I think that some students are sometimes intimidated that these are national competitions,” Dowd said. As if the singing student wondered, how could someone from a smaller city compete at a national competition? There are, of course, economic barriers, as well.
Around 2014, then, she got involved in Michael Feinstein’s work with his Great American Songbook
Foundation, which includes a summer intensive academy at his foundation’s home in Indiana. Part of this endeavor, she explains, are high school competitions, which include regionals in cities like Dallas. Winners can then move on to the national competition.
“It’s an amazing, amazing, pretty much life-changing opportunity for the student,” Dowd said. Think of Songbook South as something of a training ground, she says, for those opportunities, but done so with important people from the industry coming to Shreveport.
She aims to bring these industry talents to Songbook South, clinicians who are experienced performers and Broadway talents like Naz Edwards, who’s performed in Broadway shows like “Zorba,” “Phantom of the Opera,” “The Drowsy Chaperone” and “Anna Karenina.”
Caleb Freeman, the Songbook South high school vocal competition award winner from February, later went on to place second in the nation at the Michael Feinstein Great American Songbook High School Vocal Competition in Carmel, Ind., this past July. As Dowd puts it, they’re already seeing the fruits of their labor at Songbook South.
“These are not local people they would have access to all the time,” Dowd said of the clinicians Songbook South will make available to regional singers. Instead, they’re involved with the Great American Songbook at the national level.
In Shreveport, the organization’s mission also includes the Songbook South Singers, a group of mostly middle and high school singers who perform at regional events. This gives singers active experience with those timeless tunes in the Great American Songbook.
The connections Songbook South establishes between industry pros and the vocal students are valuable, as are the chances for these young performers to be mentored, she explained. “And these people opening up doors for these students that we’ve had,” she said.
(On the Net: SongbookSouth. org.)