Singer with autism wows community with her beautiful voice

From The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.:

MORGANTON, N. C. - It's open-mic night at the Abbie Normalz bar in downtown Morganton, and the regulars are listening to the entertainer of the moment.

As Charlene Sawyer, (pictured) a bespectacled young woman in jeans and pink Nikes, sings "Danny Boy," they stand still. They don't sip their beers or talk among themselves or puff on their cigarettes. They just listen.

Sawyer sings the old Irish ballad like they've never heard it before, delivering it in a spine-tingling, operatic style, her specialty.

When she finishes, the crowd fills the bar with applause. Sawyer grins and scoops up her orange notebook of sheet music. She knows she nailed it.

What most of the patrons in the bar don't know is that Sawyer is autistic.

Yet she sings opera in four languages and a five-octave range.

"It's an exceptional talent," says Harry Seng, director of creative therapy at J. Iverson Riddle Developmental Center, a state center for people with developmental disabilities where Sawyer accompanies music-therapy sessions on piano for participants.

Because of her disability, Sawyer will probably never sing in a great performance hall. But if she didn't have autism, she likely wouldn't have cultivated her voice to such a degree in the first place. Many high-functioning autistics such as herself nurse obsessions, and Sawyer's obsession is music.

The Catch-22, as her mother, Cyndy Sawyer, calls it, has nevertheless spanned a bridge between the isolation of disability and human connection.

"When she was younger, she didn't interact with people well," Cyndy Sawyer said. "She didn't make eye contact. But she had a need to be on stage and perform."

"It actually makes me feel free, open and free," Charlene Sawyer says as she prepares for the open-mic performance. She forces herself to lock eyes with a stranger as she talks about her music.

"It took me a while to let my emotions open up, because I was closed up for such a long time."

Sawyer, 34, sings whenever she gets the chance, at churches, conferences, retirement homes, anywhere she's invited. She takes voice lessons and practices up to four hours a day, training her rich mezzo-soprano to negotiate the intricacies of dramatic operatic roles.

Sawyer grew up in a musical family. Her grandmother was a classical singer who performed at the Hollywood Bowl in Sawyer's native California. Her father and brothers play guitar.

She started singing around the house at age 5 and taking piano lessons and performing with school choirs at 12. At 14, she started taking voice lessons from a woman who recognized her talent and offered to train her for free.

Around this time, she says, her peers made fun of her because they knew she took special education classes. Instead of the socializing she might have enjoyed as a young teenager, she immersed herself in her budding gift, learning pieces in Italian, Latin, German and French. Doctors didn't diagnose her with autism until she was 17, after her family moved to North Carolina because of her father's work.

When she graduated from high school, she moved into a group home in Cary for people with autism, but she hated it, her mother says, because the other residents were much lower-functioning than she. Her high school chorus teacher referred the family to the Riddle center, which connected her with a local group home in 1991. There, staff helped her find a voice instructor and performance venues.

"She just blossomed," Cyndy Sawyer says.

Fredda Monroe, director of The Enola Group, which operates Sawyer's group home and offers skill development through an arts program called Studio XI, says she wants to market Sawyer to perform at weddings and to perhaps cut a CD of her singing.

Sawyer has written the outline of an autobiography, and Enola staff members are searching for someone to help her write the book. Heidi Thompson, a friend of Sawyer's who accompanies her to see opera performances in Charlotte and works with her at Studio XI, says Sawyer told her she wants to "tell the story of what it's like to be an artist with a disability."

"Most autistic people can't feel or express emotion," Sawyer says. "I do."