Giving Tuesday is coming up in less than a week. We need your help to continue bringing music and performing arts to isolated people.

Heart & Soul stimulates and delights 28,000 people each year by producing over 1,300 live shows at convalescent homes, senior centers, hospitals, centers for children with disabilities, psychiatric facilities, domestic abuse shelters and prisons.

The other day my sister and I were helping a dear friend in California, Helen, to get settled in a memory care facility. Helen doesn’t have any family to look out for her—no husband, siblings or children. She was confused and afraid and we were feeling stressed seeing her and how agitated she was about it. I told my sister I would bring my guitar and would get Helen to sing her favorite song (and one of mine).

Maybe you’re not a musician. Maybe you don’t have time to serve on a board of directors. Maybe you don’t have family in a care facility. But, just as people in big cities know the value of wilderness, and just as people without animal companions know the value of having a pet, every human spirit knows the healing power of live music.

"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words."

I often recall this quote that appeared on a jazzy-blues poster featuring a smoky saxophone given to me by my mother, an opera singer in her youth.