Part of my job involves carting my allegedly portable keyboard around day centres and wards and engaging service users in singing. I try not to "entertain" them - other people can do that. My concern is more therapeutic: I'm trying to get these folk to respond to songs in ways that enhance their well-being, at least for the moment. Outcomes vary, but one learns by trying things out and responding to feedback from both the client group itself and from staff.
You don't have to be working in this field for long to realise how deeply ingrained are older people's memories of songs they've grown up with. It can be deeply moving to hear folks burst into song who may otherwise have lost the use of language.
I've produced a large-print folder of songs which I give out to particpants and keep adding to as time permits, as ideas occur to me and in response to requests. If I need to learn something new I will listen to it a few times on Utube, work out the chords and I'm away - don't need a printed score, and it's rare that a chord sequence defeats me. (One of these days I will get "The Girl from Ipanema" licked.) I can stand at the keyboard, let my fingers make the music while keeping eye contact with the audience/participants. Sometimes I'll set the machine rhythms going, and finger the chords, which means I can play with one hand and gesticulate with the other. Feels like cheating but hey.
Although a bunch of older people will sing along merrily enough to wartime songs, many of them only relate to them in the way I do - they heard their parents singing them. They'll have memories of "community singalongs" with Uncle Bert at the honky-tonk. They know "Somewhere over the Rainbow" because everybody has seen "The Wizard of Oz". But we're talking about a generation for which that was already an "old film" when they were children. They're wartime babies, or boomers. Their own music may well fifties and sixties stuff, rock and roll, Elvis, the Beatles. They might remember Abba because their kids loved them; they know the great show songs - the Rogers and Hammerstein musicals, "Oliver", "My Fair Lady", and maybe even Andrew Lloyd Blithering Webber. (Sometimes one has to suffer for one's art.)
You have to cover a wide range and get a feel for the group's mood on the day. The presence or absence of one particular member might make all the difference: I'm thinking of one lady who clearly used to jive, so if she's there we'll have Da Doo Ron Ron Ron and Rock Around the Clock and she'll be dancing with a care worker. Other weeks everyone seems a bit sleepier so I'll go for Just a Song at Twilight and Danny Boy.
The key to an activity in which you are aiming to get pwd's singing is very simple and just about foolproof: you need staff and carers to be engaging with the service users/patients. If they are on board, you have a therapeutic intervention: if they're not, you are a performer and the audience is cast in a passive mould. There's a centre I visit where this is completely understood. When I arrive, the percussion instruments will be out, there will be something like a 1:3 staff/service user ratio, which is about right. It means that staff can look out for those who don't naturally respond to the songs, who can't find the right place in the book, who need encouragement to bash their tambourines and generally be drawn into the activity.
At the other extreme I worked, supporting the professional singer who leads the overall project, in a care home setting. (I'll call her Val and she's going to pop up later.) Here you can expect the dementia to be more extreme and staff really need to earn their crust. Well, the staff had been told they needed to be in the room and they were, but you needed no expertise in body language to recognise that two or them at least were there very much on sufferance and could not abide all these antiquated sentimental dirges. And guess what, the residents just slouched in their chairs and barely responded to the music at all.
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