On a May evening in 2022, Dwan Hill and a small team of musicians set up music stands, chairs, a piano, and an organ in Columbia A, a studio on Nashville’s Music Row owned by Belmont University. Hill had brought a stack of black folders containing sheets of printed lyrics. Throughout the previous week, he’d watched as the Google form he’d created for this event filled up: 50, 75, 100 people.
They had snacks. They had charcuterie, even. But as the room filled, it was clear that people weren’t showing up for the food; they were coming to sing.
This was the first gathering of The Choir Room, and Hill assumed it would be a one-time thing. But as the night went on, he saw that something about this laid-back model of collective music making was meeting a need.
When The Choir Room convenes, singers gather in the round, with Hill and a small group of instrumentalists in the middle. They learn new songs, working out parts as they go. They clap and sway. Hill conducts the ensemble, calling out lyrics and signaling entrances. There are no auditions, and music-reading ability is optional.
Hill, a Grammy- and Dove-award-winning producer, songwriter, and recording artist based in Nashville, had been missing the community that choir creates. His roots in the Black church and gospel music gave him a passion for singing as both vertical and horizontal, worshipful and communal. He started The Choir Room with a low-key invitation posted on Instagram, curious to see who else might want to get together to sing.
The Choir Room is, first and foremost, a gathering; the monthly meetups aren’t rehearsals or performances. That first session in Columbia A attracted around 100 people. Now, events draw 700 to 1,000 and have featured artists like We The Kingdom, Ben Rector, and Matt Maher. In October 2024, Hill released The Choir Room’s first album, Let’s Have Church (Live). Even so, he says, the product was never the point.
Hill spoke with CT about the origins of The Choir Room and why he thinks choir might be exactly what the church needs today.
You’ve done just about everything in the Nashville music industry: You’re a writer, producer, recording artist, and worship leader. When did you know music was going to be the path for you?
Music is our family trade. Some people grow up playing basketball or watching their family work as engineers or join the military. For my family, it was music ministry. Three generations up are ministers and musicians. My mom is a choir director. My dad played piano and saxophone. My dad had a Hammond organ in the dining room of our house. Who does that?
I fell in love with music at an early age; I remember spending hours playing piano after school. I got into gospel music because of my mom. I had all this early exposure and education. By middle school or early high school, I made a very clear decision that I wanted to do music for the rest of my life. I just didn’t see any other option.
What you do with The Choir Room is a combination of performing, teaching, conducting, and writing. When you imagined yourself working as a professional musician when you were younger, what did you have in mind?
I moved to Nashville to go to Belmont University and major in music education; I thought I would be a high school choir director. I was told that you can have more steady work if you’re a teacher rather than a touring musician. And I’ve always really enjoyed seeing the light bulbs go off for people the first time they understand a musical concept.
But then I student taught and realized that though I love music, I do not love the in-school teaching model. I planned to move to California to get a degree in jazz piano at USC. But I didn’t get in. It was a heartbreaking season for me. I thought, Maybe if I don’t want to teach, music isn’t even my thing. Maybe I’m not as talented as I need to be.
A couple weeks after the rejection, I got called to go on the road with the blues artist Jonny Lang. That completely changed my life. I was on the road with him as his pianist for ten years. Then I met CeCe Winans and traveled with her for a while, and we eventually started a church together. And that’s when I found a new love for songwriting.
Your touring career eventually took a back seat to music ministry, and now you’re doing a little bit of both with The Choir Room. What was the catalyst for this project?
My whole life has been mostly spent in white schools and the Black church. The school I went to outside of Memphis was mostly white, Belmont was mostly white, but my family went to a Black church. Choir, in my childhood, was basically my small group. As an adult, I was missing singing with my friends in a casual, nonperformative setting, just for fun. Choir was where we ate good food and sang together. It’s where we saw God work miracles. We learned the Word of God. We found mentorship. It was basically my little church.
One day I was driving up the interstate in Nashville, and I lobbed up a prayer: “Lord, if you provide an organ and a piano in a nice room, I’ll see what I can do.”
Not too long after, a friend at Belmont offered me a space on Music Row. Suddenly we had a place to do choir.
When did you realize that The Choir Room was going to be more than a one-time thing?
When we got in the room that first time, I could tell that people were hungry for what we were offering. I was also pleasantly surprised by the diversity. Most of those people go to a church that doesn’t look like that room.
Because we sing in the round, you can look across the way and see someone who doesn’t look like you singing the same song—maybe a song that you grew up with or a song that you love.
I started to realize this was bigger than me and the team. This is actually doing something spiritual for the people in the room. They’re finding spiritual fulfillment and community in this space.
What do you think makes this kind of social, choral singing so spiritually powerful?
My favorite verse in Scripture is Colossians 3:16: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.”
Of all the things Paul could have encouraged people to do, he chose singing. The truth of God gets into the heart through singing. People aren’t showing up thinking, I’m going to receive the gospel today. But when you experience it, I think you tap into something eternal.
There’s also a communal dimension. Practically speaking, what other time in your day are you speaking or singing the same truth with people with whom you may disagree on a lot of other things?
There’s unity. There’s a coming together and even a reconciliation across cultures and ages and denominations. When you sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” or “Amazing Grace,” for that three minutes, you are united in heart. And, man, if there’s something our world needs, it’s setting aside the things that divide and picking up the things that unite.
As someone with experience in both the Black church and white evangelical churches with music practices that tend to be less choral and more focused on bands and individuals, what do you think the communal singing you model with The Choir Room can offer to churches that some other contemporary forms of musical worship can’t?
I lead worship at Cross Point Church, which is a multisite, majority white church in Nashville. They brought me in explicitly to help lead the spiritual development of the music team but also to help diversify the musical expression of the church. So, I’m in this conversation every week.
When I walk into a church service as a worship leader, I have to constantly remind people, “Don’t close your eyes. You’re not in your private prayer closet. Look at the people around you.”
We know we worship the Lord, but it’s the “together” part that I want to highlight because the setup in our modern buildings doesn’t support togetherness. There’s a stage and audience. There’s a microphone and amplification of one voice. All of that can, in many cases, discourage people from singing.
Have we actually set up our buildings to match our theology, and do we even know what our theology of worship is? Let’s back all the way up. Do we believe that the Word of God should be in the mouths of God’s people? And if so, how do we structure our services? How do we write our songs?
Culture change is difficult and slow. What does it look like to disciple a church into a healthier singing culture, in your view?
At our campuses we have people coming in with coffee cups like they’re spectating the service. I used to look at that and feel like flipping tables. Don’t you know who you’re singing about? But now I see it as a discipleship opportunity. People don’t know what they don’t know.
I try to be practical. I try to pick songs that the congregation knows or can learn very quickly. And I try to give context to songs. So, instead of just saying “Sing along with me” when we did “Way Maker” last week, I said, “Hey, I bet there are people here who are in the gap between your prayer and God answering your prayer. And whether you’re young or old, Black or white, we all know what disappointment feels like. We pray a prayer, and we don’t see God move the way we want him to. But hey, can we all just agree that God will make a way?”
I think even reluctant singers are inspired to sing by the truth of the gospel hitting their broken situation.
Then of course there are the musical things that worship leaders and musicians worry about, like keying songs in the right place so we’re not trying to sing in the stratosphere. Or giving congregations vocal cues like “Okay, let’s sing that chorus one more time.”
I think so many church musicians are inspired by The Choir Room and get excited about the prospect of cultivating a more participatory musical subculture in their communities, but most of them don’t live in Nashville. The singers at Choir Room gatherings are amateurs, but you and many of the instrumentalists who help lead it are professionals. What advice do you have for people who don’t have access to the same resources but want to start moving in this direction?
The beautiful and powerful thing about choir music is that the people who are there, are there. Jesus gave a really great metric; he said “where two or three are gathered.” So that’s enough. You don’t have to sing three-part harmony. You can sing “Amazing Grace” in unison. And that’s as beautiful as a cantata with an orchestra.
I think leaders can disciple their churches into singing where they are. You could do choir with three people in your house. It’s the genius of what God gave us. If you have breath in your lungs, sing.
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