At least once a week, and usually more often than that, Eugene chorister Amy Adams sings for a special audience. Some listen from sofas. Others recline in wheelchairs. A few dance up and down the hallway, lost in their own worlds. Some aren’t quite sure where they are.
“This is a very particular kind of floor show,” she says. “It requires a lot of energy.”
Adams is one of several local musicians in The Shedd Institute for the Arts’ Unforgettable program, which brings singalong music to memory care facilities around town. She has been performing since 2015, with a COVID break in 2020-21, playing piano and belting out everything from American Songbook standards and classic Johnny Cash to slightly more-contemporary numbers. “Contemporary” here means John Denver, Olivia Newton-John and Linda Ronstadt.
“It doesn’t have to be American Songbook from the ’30s and ’40s. It turns out the ’70s were 50 years ago!” she says.
Adams’ musical experience has largely been in more formal settings. She has sung with the Oregon Bach Festival’s Berwick Chorus and with Eugene Opera, and was for years the manager of the Eugene Symphony Chorus.
But sitting at the keyboard of an upright piano, in a room with a few dozen elderly dementia patients and their caregivers, Adams finds energy and engagement on a much more visceral level. “You get feet moving up and down,” she says. “I play toe-tapping Americana — ‘The Grand Old Flag,’ ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ Anything that will get toes tapping.”
Sometimes, she says, the energy level gets a little too high, at which point she might launch into a quieting hymn such as “Amazing Grace.” One enthusiastic listener believed he was in church when she started playing hymns. “We’ve been coming here for years,” he told her after the performance. “We appreciate so much what you do.”
There are other challenges. “A resident came lumbering up to sit with me on the piano bench and sing,” she says. “He wasn’t verbal.” The staff looked at her to see if she needed help. “I made room for him.” She shrugged it off and continued to play. The man was enthralled. “On hymns he was singing the chorus. And then he had a tear run down his cheek. That did it for me.”
Sometimes people get up and dance. The caregivers watch carefully to prevent falls. At least one time, a couple doing the two-step was interrupted by another resident who was jealous of the other man’s attention to his girlfriend.
“It can be an emotionally exhausting way to spend time,” Adams says. “It’s vocally tiring. It’s important to know a lot of songs — and to make eye contact. You read the audience. And sometimes you play a song that isn’t reaching anyone.” At that point she may shift gears quickly, taking people back to their earliest childhood memories with such children’s songs as “Alouette” and “Frère Jacques.”
The exact music she plays doesn’t matter to Adams as much as the effects that it has on her listeners. “It’s about being together and hearing a crowd laugh,” she says. And if a song doesn’t work? “It’s over in a few minutes.”