Through Sing Me a Story, children in need write and illustrate stories that get turned into songs by songwriters/musicians and sent back for the children and their families to enjoy. Photo: Sing Me a Story
Austin and Sara Atteberry bring the gift of songs-as-healing to kids who face serious illnesses.
When Austin and Sara Atteberry first met, they connected over their passion for helping kids—especially those who were going through a hard time. Sara was working as a child-life specialist at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her patients were often very sick, sometimes with life-threatening illnesses, and she noticed how much music therapy helped them. Austin (her then-neighbor) had moved to Nashville to focus on his music career, and she encouraged him to volunteer with pediatric patients at the hospital. “I started by asking them to tell me a story about whatever they wanted, and we would turn that into a song,” Austin says.
His story-to-song process was so popular with the kids at the hospital that he decided to scale it and offer the opportunity to more patients and musicians. “We put the Sing Me a Story process online and were able to reach others,” he says. This allowed other musicians, some who weren’t located in Nashville, to contribute their talents without needing to go through the official volunteer/visitor process at the children’s hospital.
Sara is now a pediatric nurse practitioner at a critical-access hospital in Baldwin, Wisconsin, and the family—now including their three kids, Elouise (Ellie), 8, Briggs, 5, and Willa, 2—landed back in Woodbury six years ago to be closer to Sara’s family. While she pursued her career in caring for kids in a clinical setting, Austin grew Sing Me a Story from its Nashville roots into a global nonprofit. Austin has now been the executive director of Sing Me a Story for 13 years, and the organization has worked with more than 5,000 songwriters and 300 organizations that serve kids in need.
Austin and Sara Atteberry. Photo: La Rabbitt Photography
One of those 5,000 songwriters is Kat Perkins, a former semi-finalist on The Voice who’s based in the Twin Cities. “Austin contacted me and said, ‘Here’s what we do. Would you be interested in being one of the writers?’ It was a no-brainer for me,” she says.
Perkins’ first collaboration with Sing Me a Story resulted in Hey Brother, debuted with the family and brothers who wrote it; one of the brothers had tuberous sclerosis, a rare disease. Chicken Strong, the next song, is based on the story of a young girl battling cancer. “We did a whole documentary on it for PBS,” Perkins says. She describes seeing the girl’s reaction at the song’s debut. “I’ll never forget her face when we took her story and made it into this song. She was stunned—you could just see the magic in her eyes.”
For Perkins, the experience was transformative. “To help these kids use a creative outlet to get through something very difficult means a lot,” she says. “There is so much power and healing in creativity.”
Producing songs for Sing Me a Story has challenged Perkins in unique ways, too. “When I write for myself, I can do whatever I want,” she says. “But with this, you’re working with someone else’s lyrics, someone else’s poem, someone else’s idea. It’s a cool juxtaposition of creativity and challenge.”
Since 2017, Perkins has formed close bonds with the families she’s worked with. “It’s incredibly fulfilling to take their ideas and make something beautiful—and catchy—that they can sing along with and remember,” she says.
Dan Gullick, a music teacher at Liberty Ridge Elementary, got his fourth- and fifth-grade choir students involved with Sing Me a Story—partly thanks to Austin and Sara’s daughter, Ellie, who was one of his kindergarteners. Austin reached out to tell Gullick about Sing Me a Story’s commission process, where an emerging composer, often a college student, is matched with a musician or ensemble to create a song for a child in need. “They offered us a free commission,” Gullick says. “We connected in the spring, and over the summer, the organization worked with the family on their story, which they then sent to the composer.”
By the fall, Gullick had drafts of the commissioned piece, Butterfly Saves the Day. The story, as he recalls, was whimsical: “The story is about a family vacation. They go to a place with lots of pools and a beach. They ride the rainbow dolphins to an island, but then the rainbow dolphins leave. They are stuck, so butterfly (a purple stuffed animal) gets giant and flies them back to their hotel.”
Preparing the Liberty Ridge choir for the spring performance was no small feat. “We started rehearsing in January,” Gullick says. “It was a tricky piece for 90 fourth and fifth graders, but they loved it. We worked through it in chunks, focusing on unison sections and building up to the more complex parts.”
The Sing Me a Story family got to attend the concert, and the performance was recorded, so they’ll have a keepsake of the day. Gullick says the experience was powerful for his choir students, too. “They talked a lot about how we’re giving back to our community through doing this and giving to this family.”
Brian Anderson is the executive director of HopeKids Minnesota, a local chapter of a national organization that provides free events and activities for children (and their families) going through cancer or other life-threatening medical conditions. “We do close to 500 events a year here in Minnesota,” Anderson says. “Private movie screenings, theater concerts, sport events, ice fishing—all kinds of things.”
Austin reached out to Anderson to see if one of the organizations, Hope Kids, would like to create a song with Sing Me a Story. “I thought the concept was really unique,” Anderson says. “And I found a family pretty quickly that I thought would be a good fit.”
Anderson attended the debut performance of the child’s song. “It was fun to see it come to life,” he says. “The mom and dad told me it was a really good process. The story they wrote was kind of silly, which is great. That’s what’s wonderful about children—their creativity just comes out.”
Anderson also mentions the importance of including the entire family in the process. “When there’s a sick child, attention often goes to them out of necessity, but we don’t want to leave the siblings overlooked,” he says. “This project allowed the whole family to work together to celebrate their Hope Kid. It strengthened their bond, which is what it’s all about.”
That’s what it’s all about for the Atteberry family, too—helping not only children going through medical crises, but also entire families who have been touched by struggle. “We connected with a little girl named Esme, whose mom was going through cancer treatment,” Austin says. “Esme had written a story about a pet mouse who goes on an adventure—a silly story, right? But when we saw her mom hearing this song performed for the first time, the mom just sobbed. She said she was so grateful to be here to see this.”
It’s evident that the ripples of Sing Me a Story—for young patients, their families, the composers who help write the songs and the musicians who bring them to life—are reaching from Woodbury out into the wide, wide world, one lyric at a time.
Sing Me a Story
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