also known as Community Song
By Kaitie Ty Warren
©2023
Video of Kaitie singing it with the members of the Sisters In Harmony Retreat with Heather Houston, 2025
Recording of Kaitie teaching it to a small LRC drop-in group, Summer 2024
Lyrics:
How would I do this without you?
How would I live, and who would I be?
I am known by knowing you
Because you are you, I am me
Kaitie says:
I wrote this song intentionally to celebrate the interconnected nature of the community singing world. I was guest leading at Marv Zauderer’s Central Marin Singers and Marv had recently had a 60th birthday. I wanted something to lead his choir in to celebrate him and the work he does in all our lives. My own choir member, JoAnn, had driven me there, across the Bay, because with my driving disability the bridge at night was a no-go; I quite literally couldn’t have been there without her.
Marv and I are both members of the Ubuntu Choirs Network (I since 2016 and he since 2023) and the UCN and celebrates and practices the very truth of Ubuntu: I am, because we are. Ubuntu is a Bantu (South Africa region) word describing what we have no correlate word for in English (neither the language nor the white western culture).
When Siobhan Robinsong and Denis Donnelly were choosing what to call the practice they were living and teaching. Nothing in our culture looked like it, nor could they find a name to call it. But they kept coming back to the word Ubuntu, which they knew from Siobhan’s experience teaching music from that part of the world. Unable to find another word that really described what they were already doing, and at a loss for whether it could be reasonable for two white Canadians to use a South African word, they wrote to Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
He responded with a letter, an excerpt of which is featured on the Ubuntu Choirs Network’s homepage.
“I am, because you are. I need you to be you so that I can be me. A choir is a choir only because its different parts work together harmoniously. Yes, a person truly is a person only through other persons. God bless you in your noble endeavour.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu, regarding the Ubuntu Choirs Network
I love the word Ubuntu and everything it and the Ubuntu Choirs Network stands for. I weave ubuntu into my song teaching – practicing communal experience through music and practicing life as a community. There are beautiful songs containing the word ubuntu but I wanted one that I could sing all in English, for my culture, that still gets at and describes what I feel and experience in this growing community.
As a friend said, “what is the ‘this’ in the first line? It’s…everything.”