I was at a wonderful retirement dinner for one of my colleagues last night, and as part of his speech the honoree took out his trumpet and began to tell a story of how much the trumpet meant to him, how it has been a part of his journey through life for the past 4o years.
He then began to play a great rendition of Hallelujah; fortunately, there was no one else to be honored at the dinner, that would have been a tough act to follow.
After he was finished, one of the guys at our table mentioned that he had just watched a great version of Hallelujah on Youtube, and said he would send us the link.
Luckily for me, he did follow up, and he was right, this version of Hallelujah is one of the best I have heard sung.
The song is part of a December 2016 performance by the choir at the Killard House School, a co-educational school in Donaghadee, County Down, Northern Ireland that focuses on children and young people with special educational needs, including Moderate Learning Difficulties, Autistic Spectrum Disorder, and associated Emotional barriers.
For this rendition of Hallelujah, the choir was led by Kaylee Rogers, a 10-year old student at the school who has autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Here is the song:
It’s hard to comprehend that she is only 10 years old. The video went viral, racking up more than 7,000,000 views in the past couple of years.
The video led to Kaylee performing the song on NBC’s ‘Little Big Shots’ this past April with the Pentatonix, and that performance has over 11 million views on Facebook.
It’s amazing to see how much better Kaylee’s voice has gotten in a little over a year, when it sounded perfect to start with.
Here is Kaylee and the Pentatonix:
As I was watching these videos today, I also came across a video of Kaylee singing the opening song from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Given my love of that play, if I had a little advance notice that Kaylee and her classmates were going to be performing Joseph this holiday season, I would have been tempted to fly to Ireland to watch the performance. As it stands, I’ll have to do with this video:
Kaylee seems to have a once-in-a-lifetime voice, and I look forward to seeing where it takes her.
Borden's Blather 