Songs That Use a Choir for More Than a Bigger Chorus

On the original recording issued by Pavilion, Dorothy Combs Morrison starts the lines and the Edwin Hawkins Singers send them back. The answering voices make a gospel testimony something the whole room can take part in. Listen for the way the repeated answers gather force even when the words stay the same.

The first verse gives you an adult singer’s voice. When the Islington Green School children arrive, the point of view changes. The same words are now coming from the people the teacher has power over, and their timing makes the answer sound organized.

Ron Ragin’s lead and the Soweto Gospel Choir trade parts in a Swahili setting of the Lord’s Prayer. They move between an individual line and a collective answer. Pick the Calling All Dawns version, where the choral part shares the lead in the arrangement.

Lebo M’s opening call and the choir’s reply, sung in Zulu, establish a gathering before Carmen Twillie begins the English verses. The voices make the scene feel populated as well as giving the song its sound. Look for the 1994 film recording, the one you hear at the ceremony.

Williams set words adapted from a poem by Ivorian writer Bernard Dadié for the scene in which the freed Africans are going home. The children’s choir gives the returning travelers a collective voice. Start with the opening track on the original Amistad album to hear how the theme works on its own.

Cave sings with the weight of an apology, and the gospel voices give that feeling a place to travel. Listen to how they carry the refrain as the band and Cave start to sound more hopeful. That shift would be harder to believe without the group taking hold of the song.

Hozier and the other singers built a choir sound from layers in the studio. It gives the names in the refrain somewhere to land and leaves Mavis Staples’s own voice distinct. Listen for the move from an individual naming people to a group that seems to take up the call.

The ensemble can make a short instruction feel like something everyone in the room knows. Listen for the changes in emphasis when a line is carried by one voice and answered by the group. The rhythm and the words survive the handoff each time.

The live Rattle and Hum recording comes from Madison Square Garden, with Dennis Bell’s New Voices of Freedom. The gospel arrangement changes who gets to carry the chorus. The choir takes up the search Bono sings about, and he can answer lines that would otherwise belong to him.

Backing singers from All Our Exes Live in Texas give the 2017 Rainbow recording a small ensemble around Kesha. It starts as something she is telling one person. Listen for how the other voices hold the refrain in place while Kesha pushes higher and farther from her opening delivery.

Michelle Pfeiffer and Sally Dworsky sing the two leading parts in the film version. A children’s chorus sings in Hebrew between the solo lines and the final ensemble. Listen to how that change in language and voices makes the song belong to a whole community leaving Egypt.

Freddie Mercury, Brian May, and Roger Taylor recorded layer after layer of vocals for the opera section. Their competing lines give the passage characters and room for an argument. Listen to the change from Mercury’s individual voice to a scene with people interrupting one another.