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They disagree about a lot, but these singers figure out how to stay in harmony
The North Fork Community Choir practices at the North Fork Baptist Church in Paonia, Colo., on Nov. 6 — the day after Election Day.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
Over the last few years and through this year’s contentious campaign season, which was rooted in America’s deep divisions, there has been a coarsening in the way people talk to each other. We wanted to explore how some are trying to bridge divides. We asked our reporters across the NPR Network to look for examples of people working through their differences. We’re sharing those stories in our series Seeking Common Ground.
PAONIA, Colo. — On a Wednesday night at a spacious, contemporary-looking church on the edge of Paonia, a small town in western Colorado, the 40 or so members of the North Fork Community Choir ran through their regular warmups.
“Really pay attention to that ‘E’ vowel,” said music director Stephanie Helleckson, as she guided the singers through various scales and arpeggios from behind a music stand. “See if you can make that a little bit rounder as a group.”
Helleckson listened carefully to how the singers’ voices blend; the details matter in an art form that’s all about achieving harmony.
Helleckson, who comes from a musical family and has spent most of her life in Paonia, said harmony is important — not just musically, but also socially.
“Because we’re all coming from different backgrounds and different perspectives, and we’re coming together to do something together, we have to learn how to not agree with somebody, but still work with them,” said the vivacious and businesslike music director.
A view of Paonia, Colo., and the surrounding West Elk Mountains.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
The North Fork Community Choir is based in a part of the country where the politics are all over the map.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
Paonia has farming and ranching families, artists, winemakers, remote workers — and a mix of political views, one choir member says.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
The North Fork is an ideologically diverse community
Cooperation is not a given, since the North Fork Community Choir is based in a part of the country where the politics are all over the map. The singers have had to come up with creative ways to continue to sing in harmony.
“We’ve got people from pretty far right to pretty far left in the chorus,” said choir member Jan Tuin.
Tuin has been living in the area since 1964. He said his dad, an auto body repairman, moved the family from near Denver in search of a slower pace of life. Over coffee at Paonia Books, a hip, newish bookstore and cafe in downtown Paonia, Tuin said the mining, farming and ranching families who’ve been around for generations have in recent decades been joined by an influx of artists, winemakers and remote workers in fields like tech.
Choir member Jan Tuin, who helped found the first community singing group in the area, at his home in Hotchkiss, Colo.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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“And so the people here now are much more diverse, I would say,” Tuin said.
Nearly everyone in the choir is white, reflecting the area’s racial demographics. But the members range in age from 11 to 87. Some of the singers believe in God; others do not. Some own guns; others do not. When the choir required masks and/or vaccines for rehearsals at various points during the COVID-19 pandemic in accordance with federal recommendations, some were happy to comply. But at least one member quit.
Tuin said people avoid bringing up potentially controversial topics during rehearsal. “We talk about our gardens a lot,” he said, laughing.
No matter their politics and values, all of the 20 or so singers NPR spoke with for this story said they focus on music-making as a uniting force and as a way to at least temporarily forget differences. This includes choir members Mary Bachran, the recently retired mayor of blue-leaning Paonia (“We make harmonies together. It’s just so wonderful.”) and Chris Johnson, the recently appointed mayor of red-leaning Crawford, a nearby ranching community. (“We’re just all there to sing.”)
Mary Bachran, community choir member and former mayor, in downtown Paonia, Colo.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
Everything’s not good in “America”
Yet the music itself sometimes draws the differences out.
The choir’s Broadway program back in the spring is a case in point. It involved medleys from well-known musicals such as My Fair Lady, Rent, Pippin, Dear Evan Hansen — and West Side Story.
The song “America” from the latter, which premiered in 1957, might be one of the most famous in the American musical canon. But some of the lyrics describing Puerto Rico as an “ugly island” rife with disease and poverty did not sit well with singers like Ellie Roberts.
“I really struggled with that because it sort of implies that Puerto Rico stinks and why wouldn’t they leave?” Roberts said. “And it just sort of encouraged some of those stereotypes.”
Roberts, a local schoolteacher, said the chorus discussed the issue at rehearsal. “What are we celebrating and what do we not want to celebrate?” she said.
They thought about changing the lyrics, but ended up doing the song with a disclaimer that music director Helleckson made from the stage.
“You have to think about context for this piece,” Helleckson said in a video of the performance captured in May. “This piece has some things that are maybe not as acceptable in today’s day and age as they were when it first came out.”
The North Fork Community Choir practices at the North Fork Baptist Church in Paonia, Colo.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
Music director Stephanie Helleckson, who has spent most of her life in Paonia, leads community choir practice at the church.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
During community choir practice at the North Fork Baptist Church in Paonia.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
“Master of the House” an issue too
Meanwhile, other members of the ensemble brought up a different concern to do with the raucous showstopper from Les Misérables, “Master of the House.”
In the song, a seedy innkeeper and his entourage of petty criminals invoke Jesus as they fleece their customers.
“It bothered me, because I did not want to use the Lord’s name that way,” said singer Kim Johnson, a Christian counselor. Johnson said she and some others from the group discussed the matter with Helleckson and came up with alternatives to singing “Jesus.”
“I sang ‘cheeses’ instead of ‘Jesus,’” said Johnson. “It worked.”
Pushing boundaries to launch conversations
Helleckson said she knew the Broadway program would be a little bit provocative.
“It’s pushing boundaries that some people are not comfortable with in our little rural pocket of America,” Helleckson said. “And so part of programming some of this music is to actually have those conversations. So we don’t just assume that everybody’s the same as us and everybody believes the same things and acts the same way.”
According to a Chorus America report assessing the impact of group singing, choir members are more adaptable and tolerant of others than the general population. “Almost two-thirds of singers (63%) believe participating in a chorus has made them more open to and accepting of people who are different from them or hold different views,” the study noted.
New York University sociology professor Eric Klinenberg said the mere act of coming together to undertake a regular, shared activity with others, such as choral singing, can promote bridge-building. But it’s possible for such groups to go further.
“If your objective is to just get a group of people together to sing well, forget about everything else in the world, maybe you don’t need to encourage those other conversations about politics,” said Klinenberg, who studies how people gather and connect both within and across ideological lines.
But, he said, if the objective is also to create a more decent society and bridge differences by using the relationships that you build while making music together as a foundation of trust to advance a conversation about something like politics, “that could be an amazing thing.”
Choir member Chris Johnson, the recently appointed mayor of Crawford, Colo., says: “We’re just all there to sing.”
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
Choir members hug at practice the day after Election Day.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
Small steps toward greater understanding
In a small way, the issues that arose with the Broadway concert point toward this aspiration. Choir member Chris Johnson, for example, said he didn’t have a problem with West Side Story. But he doesn’t fault those who pushed for the disclaimer.
“I don’t think that explanation was necessary, but it’s OK,” he said.
And singer Linda Talbott said her mind has been expanded as a result of the faith-based objections other singers in the group had to Les Mis.
“I think I’m much more aware now of what could be objectionable to certain people,” she said. “I don’t think I thought about it. There it was in front of me, I wanted to sing it, and I did.”
Helleckson said she would like to continue to program more material that inspires these types of conversations.
The North Fork Community Choir has been prepping for upcoming holiday performances.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
In the meantime, the ensemble is prepping for a pair of holiday performances of Handel’s Messiah. The singers said the music is challenging. But so far it’s not been too controversial.
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
The U.S. Supreme Court
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Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.
The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.
Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”
Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.
The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.
And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.
An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.
The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”
“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.
Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.
The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”
Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.
Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.
“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.
Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.
“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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