A Herstory of SSN

In 1981, Echo (Linda Ray) of the Kansas City Women's Chorus and Linda Small of the St. Louis Women's Choir started the Sister Singers Network with a logo, letterhead, and a list of choruses. It was their vision to create a feminist network of women’s choruses that could learn from each other and come together to share music. The early SSN choral festivals were part of the Ozark Women's Festivals, until the SSN outgrew them. The first separate choral festival that was hosted by the SSN was in Kansas City in 1984.

In 1988, a planning meeting was held to organize SSN beyond the mailing-list stage. The Operations Matrix system was developed. This organizational structure continued to evolve over the years, with the structure being modified last at a planning meeting in 1996. The operations matrix included the following spokes: regional coordinators (contact persons for choruses in each region), a treasurer, an archivist, publications contact person, various ad hoc taskforces and consultants for specific projects (e.g. festival planning, 501c3, diversity caucuses, new chorus support, vital signs, e-mail, etc...) and then in the center of all of these spokes is the Hub (communication central).

Sister Singers Network has hosted several international women’s choral festivals in various cities around the United States, including Kansas City, St. Louis, Madison, Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston, Cincinnati, and Grand Rapids. A 1996 festival scheduled for Portland was unfortunately cancelled. After that, the activity of the network dropped significantly for several years, and membership in the organization lapsed until 1999 when several gatherings of chorus women led to the revitalization of the organization.

At National Women’s Music Festival in 1999, a group of chorus women met to begin discussing SSN and how much it means to have a feminist organization like this for women’s choruses. Later that summer at the GALA conference in DC, still more chorus women met to find out a little about the history of SSN and what might need to happen to get the organization up and running again. Finally, a mailing went out to all the former SSN choruses, plus any new women’s choruses that were known, to invite everyone to a SSN planning meeting in Chicago.

At the October 1999 SSN planning meeting in Chicago, a very exciting thing happened. The Grand Rapids Women’s Chorus with the help of Sistrum from Lansing, MI, offered to host the next Sister Singers Network Festival in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2001!!! A work group sprang out of that meeting to assist with planning. They produced the festival in May 2001, which was attended by 26 choruses.

The San Diego Women's Chorus hosted our 25th anniversary SSN festival, Western Sol, in 2006--our first West Coast festival. We also commissioned our first choral composition for the 2006 festival: "Ode to Women" by Josefina Benedetti.

Artemis Singers, Chicago's Lesbian Feminist Chorus, is planning to host the next Sister Singers Network National Women's Choral Festival in 2010.

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