Young at Heart Chorus: 'They Don't Expect Us to Sing Rock'

April 9, 2008— -- On a recent afternoon in the college town of Northampton, Mass., a group of seniors aged 70-90 gathered to practice singing. But instead of church hymns or World War II-era classics, Jimi Hendrix drifted from the rafters, with a live rock band as accompaniment.

Yes, the song was "Purple Haze" and, yes, the people singing it were pretty old … and pretty good.

The members of the Young at Heart chorus might be the unlikeliest rockers around, in that every member of the group is at least 70. Widows and widowers, grandmothers and grandfathers. Men and women who have seen a lot of life, but also a lot of loss.

When asked how big a part the Young at Heart chorus is in her life, Jean summed up the group's importance to its elderly members. "It's about it," she says. "I've lost my husband."

Young at Heart is the brainchild of choir director Bob Cilman, a 50-something active in the Northampton arts scene, whose musical training consists of forming a band with his friends as a 13-year-old and playing the Bar Mitzvah circuit in his hometown of Rochester, N.Y.

But 26 years ago, while working with a group of seniors, Cilman and his colleagues realized they might be onto something special.

"The very first person who tried it was this Polish woman who did the most tortured version of 'Let It Be' by the Beatles," he said. "I kind of loved it because it was so … you couldn't recognize the song in what she was doing, but it was so beautiful that she felt something so deeply when she was singing it."

Cilman has never looked back, developing the group into a sought-after act that is now something of an international sensation. They have toured all over the world and are now the subject of a remarkable documentary opening April 8, also called "Young at Heart."

The chorus members' ages makes them all the more dedicated to the hard work of learning songs they would likely never listen to at home, Cilman says. "It's an easy group to work with on some level because they're very available," he says. "They're not thinking about where they're going to be able to go next with this other than what they're doing; this is where they want to be."