VANDERBILT SAVES VOICES OF THE STARS
Nashville clinic serves famous and unknown in Music City
Singers are susceptible to abrasions and calluses from slamming vocal cords together too hard, too often, said Voice Center physician Dr. David Francis.
There also are fluctuations in the thickness of the vocal cords that can cause voice problems. Just like guitar strings, thinner vocal cords make higher notes. Thicker guitar strings — like vocal cords swollen from overuse or a virus — make lower notes, the gravelly or low voice that sometimes accompanies colds and flu.
And then there are potentially serious, potentially irreversible voice-altering afflictions like polyps, cysts and cancer.
Doctors at the Voice Center have found that country music and rock ‘n’ roll singers are more likely to suffer from vocal problems than opera and other classically trained singers.
Shania Twain, for example, had lesions on her vocal cords. Larry Gatlin had to undergo several surgeries to remove cysts that had developed on his cords, followed by long periods of complete silence — “which was pretty hard, because I always have a lot of witty, clever and glib things to say,” Gatlin said.
For country rocker Gary Allan, an unexpectedly discovered polyp on his vocal cord robbed him of his falsetto for most of last year.
Allan got lucky. He had been on The Last Rodeo Tour with country duo Brooks & Dunn, but the tour was postponed because of Ronnie Dunn’s vocal problems — which the Voice Center also treated.
During the hiatus, Allan’s manager suggested the performer go to the center because he had noticed some subtle changes in Allan’s vocal range.
At the initial exam, Dr. Gaelyn Garrett, the Voice Center’s medical director, told Allan to stick out his tongue and then grabbed onto it with a piece of white gauze — “like a pair of pliers,” Allan said — to insert a tiny camera into the back of his mouth for a view of the singer’s throat.
The vascular polyp she saw there — basically, a small lesion on the vocal cord — required surgery.
Allan, whose trademark raspy, rocker voice has earned him 24 hit country singles, had misgivings. Allan was familiar with the Voice Center because he had accompanied his own father, honky-tonk singer Harley Herzberg, to the Voice Center after thyroid cancer surgery.
“Everybody was super reassuring, but then you had to sign all these papers saying you know all these things can go wrong,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘I can’t imagine not singing. If I had to come up with a Plan B right now it would be brutal.’ ”
Allan said he has completely recovered from the surgery last November — his raspy sound intact. more!
