KANSAS CITY, Mo. — If you’ve noticed a sweet sound around Kansas City this week, it’s probably the Sweet Adelines 76th Annual Convention, which continues through the weekend at the Municipal Auditorium and the Kansas City Convention Center.
Sweet Adelines, the largest women’s singing group in the world with more than 19,000 members, has taken over downtown with nearly 5,000 quartet and chorus singers from around the world.
"This is our championship," Sweet Adelines International CEO Tammy Talbot. "I know you have the famous Kansas City Chiefs here, but this is Sweet Adelines’ championship."
Quartets, which perform barbershop-style four-part harmonies, and choruses, which can be a few dozen to more than 120 singers, are competing in Kansas City for this year’s championships.
The LoveNotes — a quartet that formed in 2002 in San Jose, California, among 11-to-14-year-old friends — were crowned Sweet Adelines International Champion Quartet in 2013.
“It’s been kind of a constant in our lives,” Mia Wardell, the LoveNotes’ lead, said. “We’ve all done lots of different musical things that we love, but it’s been wonderful to come back to Sweet Adelines. You can find a chapter anywhere you go in the world, so we really grew up in the organization."
Winners earn crowns and celebrity status for life in Sweet Adelines circles.
“If you win the quartet competition at (the) international (competition), you are crowned a queen of harmony,” Wardell said. “Every year, it’s a different crown and part of the honor of that is that you can wear the crown forever at convention. It kind of signals to everyone who you are. There’s no hiding.”
Winning a Sweet Adelines crown has allowed the LoveNotes to travel the world.
“We’ve been all over the world, places that we never would have gone as individuals,” Wardell said.
But it’s the personal impact they cherish.
“Being a Sweet Adeline has made me blossom into the person that I am,” Caitlin Castelino, the LoveNotes’ baritone, said. “When I first joined, I was super shy ... but I have become somebody who can public-speak and teach and perform on stage. I don’t know how else to say it other than it has completely changed my life and driven me to where I am today.?
Past quartet champions can no longer compete as the same quartet in Sweet Adelines’ annual competitions, but they often come back anyway.
“I am so thankful for this organization, for the people in it, because they’re all amazing people and we come once a year and get to see people from all over the world, our friends from all over the world — and it’s like we just saw them a week ago,” Castelino said. “I just love this organization so, so very much.”
Brittany Gilmore, the LoveNotes’ tenor, added: “We have friends all over the country and all over the world that we never would have met.”
While Sweet Adelines is a competition, it’s a friendly one.
“Every competitor cheers for all the other competitors,” Wardell said. “It’s really loving and supportive. It’s just this home where we can share in the joy of doing something we really love. It’s very therapeutic.”
Thousands of the LoveNotes’ friends have flocked to Kansas City, which hosted 384 conventions and events last year and welcomed a record 28.4 million visitors.
“There’s a lot that goes into selecting a site,” Talbot said. “We met with the Kansas City Visitors and Convention Bureau. You had a lovely facility here. You have ample hotel rooms, ample spaces for chorus and quartet rehearsals, so it was a perfect fit.”
Officials with Visit KC said that tourism is pacing even better in 2024 than last year’s record-setting year, which included an estimated $4 billion in visitor spending.
Visit KC estimated that conventions and events alone generated nearly 460,000 hotel room nights and roughly $428.5 million in economic impact.
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KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County. Share your story idea with Tod.
