Brian Dolphin & You

“Dolphin & You” began as a “Community Sing” in which anyone could show up and invite others to sing along with them on a given traditional, original, or even experimental song. It morphed into an entity whose main purpose was to collaboratively arrange, perform, and record the songs of talented, up-and-coming-songwriters. In 2026, it still remains a priority to continue to write songs and to produce the songs of other songwriters so that they may both reach a finished state and be accessible to the public. As such, Dolphin & You has recorded over one hundred and fifty songs with dozens of artists over the past five years and it continues to do so. In December of 2024, with funds successfully raised through Fractured Atlas, Dolphin & You also released a thirty-one song, two-disc compilation featuring seventeen different artists and over fifty musicians of all genres and backgrounds.

But, what became of the “Community Sing”? While the Dolphin & You Patreon still disseminates harmony part recordings of different folk songs to subscribers - and it has produced over fifty such songs in this easily-learnable form - the in-person communal singing mostly ceased from 2020-2024, clearly coinciding with the Covid pandemic.

Happily, in the spring of 2024, when most people once again returned to larger in-person singing sessions, I, Brian Dolphin, founded “Philly Folk Choir,” whose mission is to create a safe, fun, and productive environment for people to learn to sing in a variety of folk music styles from all over the world. We seek to honor and respect the folk music, tradition-bearers, and each other in our singing, learning, and working together. While we started with under twenty singers, we now have over fifty members and we have learned songs from Ukraine, England, Tanzania, Bali, Georgia, Lithuania, Ireland, Albania, Venezuela, Belarus, Macedonia, Austria, the United States, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We have also brought in special guest singers, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists to give us master classes in their own specific musical styles. We have also studied and performed different animal songs.

With Philly Folk Choir as part of the Dolphin & You musical ecosystem, we have once again returned to the dual focus at the heart of Dolphin & You, investing in both original and traditional musics alike. We now have a "Community Sing" at the end of our seasonal recitals.