How many people does it take to sing Waltzing Matilda?
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Well if you ask Astrid Jorgensen the answer is a “full pub load of people”.
Ms Jorgensen is a Brisbane-based jazz vocalist and music teacher who runs a nice sideline business making unruly pub choirs work.
In 2017 with the help of artists Megan Bartholemew and Waveney Yasso, she established Pub Choir - a Brisbane community initiative that meets once monthly to learn a song from scratch in three-part harmony.
The choir is open to anybody and everybody, and came out of a desire “to show the world that anybody can sing, and that singing together feels magnificent.”
She was in Winton on Thursday evening to manage a pub choir to sing Waltzing Matilda as part of the town’s Way Out West festival.
With the help of Ms Yasso on guitar, she divided the audience at the North Gregory Hotel – appropriately where the classic song was first performed – into three parts of males, “high females” and “low females” to spend an hour learning the parts before pulling it all together.