By Grant Drake, MD
Lost Voices Board President
I want to call special attention to our recent Tom Saunders Memorial Concert for Lost Voices, performed this past April. It highlights how far Lost Voices has come in our 15 years and especially our advances in this last year dealing with the challenges posed by COVID-19.
This concert featured some of our original Lost Voices singer-songwriters, artists who pioneered our program and are still going strong for us. Josh White, Jr. worked alongside Founder Mike Ball when he developed the original workshops in 2006 at Maxey Boys Training School. Not long after that, Kitty Donohoe joined Mike at the Adrian Girls Training School. Annie Capps has been another one of our key workshop facilitators almost from the beginning, and along with husband Rod Capps they have become major boosters and Lost Voices concert performers.
This concert also celebrates our successes and breakthroughs in the past very challenging eighteen months. When Covid hit so hard in March 2020, all our many scheduled programs were cancelled indefinitely, and our partner facilities were understandably unable to let us come back. However, after some big initial doubts, Mike Ball and his team developed increasingly effective and innovative Zoom song writing and recording techniques so that we were able to quickly resume our work with the youth. A silver lining of these daunting Covid storm clouds is that these new Zoom techniques have enabled us to bring our programs to more at risk kids and more locations in a more flexible way and potentially a more cost effective way.
Lastly, the concert demonstrates our increased ability to record our live performances with advanced visual and audio quality, so that we can preserve these memorable concerts on our website and YouTube. Mike Ball and our new team member, Dennis Kingsbury, expended Herculean efforts to create what I feel is a very high quality concert video.
So listen and watch again, or for the first time, to this concert on our website to see the vitality and innovations of our expanding work in this increasingly post-Covid world!
