It’s 11 a.m. in the Bankers Hill neighborhood of San Diego, and St. Paul’s Cathedral is jumping. Beneath the church’s towering pipe organ, a 70-strong choir is powering through a soulful rendition of the Nina Simone classic “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” The drummer drives the rhythm with propulsive fills and cymbal crashes; the pianist, playing on a Steinway grand, adds her own bluesy riffs. In Simone’s version, the song is laid-back, deceptively simple, and full of bittersweet longing. But here, in God’s house, sung by this big wall of voices, it becomes a joyful, thumping gospel hymn of praise.
Leading the rehearsal is Steph Johnson, a professional jazz singer and recording artist. This morning, she’s dressed comfortably in gray sweatpants, sneakers, and a long brown coat, her hair a mane of dark brown curls. When the song ends, the choir erupts in whoops and applause. “Yes!” Johnson shouts to the crowd. “Yes. Let’s give it up for ourselves!”
“Can you all hear me?” she asks in that cavernous place, and everybody can.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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The group, Voices of Our City, is a choir made up of San Diegans who have been affected by homelessness (there are around 100 members in all). It’s one of the most well-known choirs of its kind in the country. Ten years ago, Johnson, now the group’s CEO and creative director, was bringing oranges and clothes to local unhoused people, “just doing my own kind of outreach in the community,” she says. She discovered that many of them, like her, loved music and loved to sing. “We just met as creatives,” she says. Inspired by the connection, she cofounded the group in 2016 with Nina Leilani Deering, a fellow musician who passed away in 2020.
Born and raised in San Diego, Johnson was three when her folks divorced. After that, she divided her time between San Diego, a small town north of the city called Poway, and Arkansas, where her dad worked for a time as a chicken farmer. “My mother’s disabled and struggled with mental health, and we lived below the poverty line,” she says.
In the choir’s early days, Johnson looked for would-be members wherever they happened to be. “We’d climb under freeways and go into shelters and safe-camp parking lots,” she says. Before long, Johnson met a young pastor whose church gathered in a sheet metal–roofed warehouse in the Low Bottoms area of San Diego’s East Village. “It’s kind of our skid row,” Johnson says. The pastor asked if she’d like to use the space, and Johnson said yes. Only a few singers showed up for those first rehearsals. Within months, the choir had more than 60 members.
Voices of Our City has been featured on The Kelly Clarkson Show and performed at the Wiltern, Los Angeles’s famed theater; joined the San Diego Symphony to celebrate the grand reopening of the Jacobs Music Center; and sang at the Balboa Theatre’s 100th-anniversary celebration. The choir’s biggest milestone—and audience—came in 2020, when the group competed on the NBC show America’s Got Talent.
Johnson didn’t see any of this coming. When she first floated the idea of creating a choir for the unhoused, she says, “people were like, ‘You’re crazy.’ I didn’t get a lot of support right away.”
Over the group’s 10-year run, it has added staffers, new creative outlets for its members (like songwriting classes), and support services—the Voices team provides meals, bus passes, and housing assistance to many participants in the choir. But what might stand out most is the atmosphere in the room. “I have never seen a community, let alone a nonprofit serving people who are experiencing homelessness, where there was this kind of joy and laughter,” says Lindsey Seegers, the choir’s executive director. “I didn’t even know that was possible.”
GOLDEN BUZZER
When the group first started, it shared rehearsal space with a variety of organizations serving homeless and indigent people, from community food banks to local ministries. “You’d have people banging on the windows as we were inside trying to sing,” Seegers says. “Members had to physically step over people to come in the door for choir.”
News of the choir quickly spread, driven as much by its novelty as by its musical chops. In 2018, KPBS aired the documentary The Homeless Chorus Speaks, which showcased the positive impacts that music was having on members’ lives. The next year, producers from America’s Got Talent came calling. The logistics of potentially transporting several dozen unhoused singers to Los Angeles for the final auditions—feeding and housing them and managing possible medical issues—were daunting. Johnson said no to the producers a few times, she says.
AGT was miles away from what Johnson had originally envisioned for the choir. Growing up, she hadn’t been far from where many of her future choir members were now. She simply wanted to do something positive with people she was meeting on the streets.
But AGT? Network TV? In the end, the will of the choir members won out. A few months after the preliminary audition, they learned they had made the show. The experience was surreal: chartered buses to L.A., preshow interviews. It was a taste of Hollywood that few would otherwise have ever known. “Heidi Klum told me, ‘Oh, I like your hair!,’ ” says Raven, a longtime San Diego resident who joined the choir seven years ago. “I just went, Miss Heidi Klum said something about my hair? I was like, Oh, I’m done.”
During its final audition, the choir won one of the contest’s coveted Golden Buzzers, when the host or a judge hits a button that sends an act straight to the live shows. Once there, Johnson says, “the audience was insane.”
“They gave us three or four standing ovations while we were performing,” she says. “People were crying, falling off risers.”
The appearance boosted visibility and helped attract donors and partnerships. In 2022, the choir brought on Seegers as its first executive director. A social worker, Seegers had spent more than a decade in the nonprofit sector, working in food banks and helping former inmates re-enter the workforce. She took over the administrative tasks Johnson had been juggling alongside music duties. “The first thing I did was bring the choir to St. Paul’s,” Seegers says, “because rats had been eating our songbooks at our last location.”
IN HARMONY
Even with all of its successes, Voices still contends with its own unique set of challenges. For most singing groups, the biggest worries are personality clashes and landing the next gig. For the members of Voices, daily worries range from food insecurity and physical disability to mental health crises. When the choir gets a gig, a top priority is ensuring that singers are fed. If they’re performing at a gala, nobody drinks so that those in recovery won’t be led astray.
This morning, before the rehearsal at St. Paul’s, several men were pulling double duty in the church’s courtyard as hosts and de facto bouncers. “Dennis and his team are at the front door to greet people, but they’re also assessing if someone seems like they’re not in the right headspace to be here,” says Seegers.
And then there’s the high mortality rate among unhoused people, a statistical fact that has shaped the choir in ways Johnson never anticipated. “Homelessness does age folks,” she says. Around the age of 60 or 65, she has observed, is when many begin to pass away.
Steven Reid was 64 when Voices performed “Sounds of the Sidewalk,” an original composition, on AGT. Reid, one of the choir members who helped write the song, was unable to go to L.A. and be on the show because he was in the final stages of cancer. “After we got the Golden Buzzer, all of the choir called him and said, ‘Steven, your words live on,’ ” Johnson says. Reid died soon after.
When she started the group, Johnson didn’t realize she’d be building something that would offer a space in which some people would be “riding out the end days of their lives,” she says. “Just being with people as they take their last breaths, or to have celebrations of life for them, is such a healing thing for the families. But it’s also healing for the choir, just knowing that they won’t die alone.”
Hundreds of singers have gone through the choir over the past decade, Johnson estimates, and the organization is looking ahead. The group’s podcast, Sounds of the Sidewalk, is now in its third season, and later this year, funds willing, the choir plans to release its first album, featuring songs—many written in collaboration with members—recorded live at St. Paul’s.
The organization is expanding its outreach by helping connect members to much-needed mental health services. Seegers recalls seeing would-be choir members linger in the back of rehearsal week after week, wanting to join but worried about fitting in after long periods spent living alone on the streets. “It’s really something to see them move from struggling with that to fully socializing, being known by name by their peers,” she says. “Just to be able to say hello to people and say, ‘I’m hearing voices today, but I’m really happy to be here.’ ”
The choir has also changed how audiences see unhoused people—something that Johnson says was always part of the point.
“It’s one thing to hear a choir member who just turned 80 say, ‘I’ve been living in my truck with my cat for two years, and now I’m in an apartment where I have my own little refrigerator,’ ” she says. “But it’s different when you’re inviting an audience into a space of joy and funk, and it’s just this uplifting thing that gets you moving. And then you hear a person sing, and you’re like, That’s a grandma. And that grandma’s homeless? It really has inspired people to think about homelessness in a different way, to think about who it affects in a different way.”
Back at the rehearsal, Johnson is putting each choir section through its paces. Her singing voice, familiar from her albums and concert tours, is a smoky alto that critics have compared to Cassandra Wilson’s and Diana Krall’s. When she’s directing the choir, though, it carries easily across the cathedral.
She shows the altos how to handle a tricky interval, then sings the bass line for the men herself—“In the whole world, you know, there’s a million boys and girls”—laughing as she drops down for those low, low notes. She’s encouraging, but a stickler. The timing in one passage is off, so she sings the phrase again, striking each syllable so everyone knows exactly where the accents fall.
The altos try again. This time, it’s perfect.
Johnson beams. “Beautiful!” she says. “Beautiful.”
She looks out at the gathered faces.
“Now, shall we put it all together?”•
Robert Ito is a journalist based in Los Angeles. He writes about film, television, and theater for the New York Times.
