Songs in the Key of ... Karaoke?

It’s certainly not for the faint of heart.

But where else can you test your mettle and attempt to sing – either well or not so well — country, pop, show tunes, hip-hop, heavy metal, the Great American Songbook or classic rock standards all within a matter of minutes? And have some laughs and make some good friends in the process?

Why, karaoke, of course!

On any given Tuesday or Wednesday evening in Reisterstown, singers ranging in age from 14 to 70 belt out tunes to their heart’s content. Most don’t need liquid encouragement because, frankly, they don’t care what anyone thinks. If they’re off-key, so be it. If they’re shouting instead of singing, too bad.

It’s karaoke, folks, and the 30-plus regulars look forward to those nights when they can just let loose and sing, warble, hum, whistle, dance, laugh and just plain have some good old-fashioned fun.

Tell Me More, Tell Me More!

After friends convinced him to check out karaoke last summer, my husband, Rick, agreed to go and listen. He absolutely loved it and kept going back, week after week. It wasn’t until months later that I actually joined him. In fact, I had to prod Rick into singing.

Since when does someone go to karaoke continually but not sing?

After a little partaking of libations, we tried out “Summer Nights” from “Grease.” Tried is the key word here, but once the last crescendo ended, the cheers were loud and constant. People thanked me for getting Rick to sing.

It was impossible to be embarrassed. It just didn’t matter how bad we sounded. Rick enjoyed it so much that now he goes solo, choosing “Piano Man,” “Let It Be” and other classic rock favorites

Rick’s good friend, Mike Bush, was introduced to karaoke by his pal, Jodi Shani.

“I have met many wonderful people from different walks of life,” Bush says. “We sing, we laugh … definitely laugh … and it provides us the opportunity to get out of our normal life routine and do something we all enjoy.”

Shani says she “stumbled upon” karaoke one day when she ordered curbside food after her daughter’s lacrosse game.

“It was like ‘The Voice’ live,” she recalls. She took the food inside and served as a cheerleader to the singers. She didn’t sing herself for months but when she did, she joined a few others and realized that she could just be herself and let down her hair.

“Everyone accepts each other as who they are,” she says. “It’s an environment where you can just kick back and relax before you re-enter the real world.”

Uptown Funk!

“The first time I sang I was so nervous,” admits Joey Danick, 23, who hadn’t tried karaoke since his senior class trip to Israel. “The microphone was shaking in my hand. I was standing in front of people I didn’t know.”

That was about 18 months ago, and now he sings with abandon about three times a night and happily answers to the moniker “Fearless.”

Jordan Loux, also 23, finds karaoke a great way to pass the time since graduating from college. He, too, sang during his senior trip to Israel.

“It’s fun,” says Loux, an admittedly shy guy, “and sort of liberating, too. Strangers clap when I’m done and cheer. I like that.”

Karaoke started in Reisterstown in the mid-1990s, according to Neil Goldberg, owner of Golden Productions, which provides the music. Goldberg is the third disc jockey to provide the music at Bill Bateman’s on Tuesdays and O.C. Brewing Company on Wednesdays, although he has provided the mobile service for parties in the area since 1996.

Goldberg estimates up to 75 percent of the regular core singers are Jewish, and they are all part of a “karaoke family” started on Facebook by Christian Ty, a Franklin High School junior. The diversity of ages and genres is apparent as Christian – aka, “Kidd” — routinely sings “Uptown Funk” and “Love Shack,” all the while encouraging the crowd to join in.

Others, like Phil Wolfson, prefer “Wagon Wheel” and “American Woman.”

Wolfson, whose karaoke handle is “Max Mayhem,” stumbled upon karaoke 19 years ago at a bar. The Owings Mills resident has sung up to four times a week all over Baltimore. His first time, too, was filled with nerves, but he pictured himself in a big coliseum, singing up to the people in the rafters.

“To this day, if I do something challenging, I look up,” he says. “It’s easier to hit the higher notes that way.”

Cheryl Taragin remembers hitting the high notes when she entertained relatives at a young age, and when she played a munchkin in her Bedford Elementary School production of “The Wizard of Oz.” She loved the feeling of being on stage, much like it feels when she now sings karaoke.

“Karaoke gives you a chance to be out there and shine a little bit,” she says. “The audience loves it and that’s the best part. You can sound awful and if you can get the crowd moving, it doesn’t matter.”

Janie Silverman started singing karaoke in her early 20s when she spent three weeks in Japan. She equates that experience in the Land of the Rising Sun to singing in a recording studio. Today, she finds karaoke a wonderful stress reliever and a way of expressing herself.

‘At First I Was Afraid, I Was Petrified …’

If someone’s unsure about singing or nervous, there are always many in the “family” who offer to sing along.

“It’s not necessarily a performance, it’s to have fun,” says Taragin, who often joins Silverman and many of the other ladies in singing such feminist anthems as Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” the all-time most popular karaoke song among females according to Goldberg. (Most popular for males is Neil Diamond’s immortal “Sweet Caroline,” and Old Blue Eyes’ “My Way.”)

Several of the karaoke enthusiasts say there’s a bit of a sense of Jewish community to the karaoke group.

“You don’t need a synagogue, you do it here,” says Shani. “You find people like you who like music and singing — and a lot of us are Jewish.”

Wolfson says the Reisterstown karaoke sessions are like no other that he’s experienced anywhere else, where people tend to be more discreet and segregated.

“It’s not like here where we are a cohesive group. It’s unique,” he says. “We have parties outside of karaoke. You don’t get that anywhere else.”

Linda L. Esterson is an Owings Mills-based freelance writer.

Photos by Rick Esterson