Nobody gave her the solo. So she sang one anyways.
Nobody Gave Her the Solo. So She Sang One Anyway.
Paula C. Snyder grew up without her mother's belief. She was good enough to read her part, stay on key, and blend into the chorus — but no one offered her the solos, and her high school advisor steered her toward occupational therapy instead. So she went. And then she taught herself to sing solo anyway. She taught herself guitar and piano, wrote her first song hitchhiking across the country with $50 in her pocket, and built a professional music career entirely on her own terms. At 74, she's still performing.
In this episode of Who We Become — Life Beyond Change, Amanda Lentz sits down with Paula C. Snyder — self-taught musician, singer-songwriter, and creative entrepreneur — for a conversation that stretches across seven decades of choosing herself, over and over, when no one else did.
Paula built a professional musical life and protected it through a thyroid surgery, the end of a marriage, single motherhood without support, seasons of depression, and physical setbacks that would have stopped most people for good. She's now 74, still performing, and advocating for both a husband with medical challenges and a 98-year-old mother. She has never given up the music — because she decided long ago she would never give her life up for anyone. It's too hard, she says, to start again.
Good Enough to Blend, Never to Solo
Paula is careful about how she describes her mother. It wasn't that her mom doubted her music, exactly — it's that she didn't believe in much of anything about her. Rigid about right and wrong, she had a fixed vision of who Paula should be, and nearly everything Paula wanted, chose, or loved landed on the wrong side of it. At school, teachers found her a reliable chorus voice: she could read her part and stay on key. She learned to blend in. She learned to please everyone.
What saved her was a father who buffered all of it — a first-chair violinist with perfect pitch who led family sing-alongs and let music stay a source of joy in the house. And underneath the wish to be liked, some small, insistent part of Paula kept noticing when her mother simply wasn't right, and quietly deciding to trust what she saw instead.
"She'd say, 'We do it this way.' And I'd think — but there are a million different ways to do things. Why can't we do it this way?"
— Paula C. SnyderTeaching Herself Anyway
The instruments came to her sideways. Her brother took guitar lessons at twelve; her dad more or less stole the guitar from her brother, and Paula stole it from her dad. There was a piano in the house and lessons at six, but she chafed at the assigned books — she didn't want to play John Thompson exercises, she wanted to pick out the songs she heard on the radio. She was a hands-on learner who needed to understand how a thing actually worked, and she'd rather be given something different to try than made to do it the "easy" way everyone else did.
So she sat down at the piano and taught herself, even as her mother asked why she didn't have something else to do. The writing came from the same place — not a plan to craft a good song, but a need to say something in a form that felt safe enough to be heard.
"It wasn't about writing a good song. It was: I want to say something, and this is a way I can say it that might be acceptable."
— Paula C. SnyderWhen she played those songs live and someone told her "I feel that way too," the circuit closed. Music wasn't only self-expression. It was connection.
$50 and a Laundry Bag
In 1971, a college student studying occupational therapy, Paula found her summer plans collapsing at the same moment her boyfriend admitted to a weekend with someone else. Part of her wanted to prove something. Part of her was just curious what was out there. So she packed everything she owned into a laundry bag, took her guitar and $50, and started hitchhiking west — a different era, and, as Amanda is quick to note, not a recommendation.
She made it all the way to California — Michigan to Cleveland to Interstate 80, sleeping in communal houses, sharing peanut butter and tuna with strangers, making beads out of bread to pass the time. When she finally called home, her parents answered in two very different keys. Her mother said: come home, I'll send a ticket. Her father said: write a journal. She kept the journal. She still has it.
The moment she returns to most often came in the Nevada desert at dusk, alone, no cars on the road, deciding whether to spend the night with the snakes or take the next ride no matter who it was. When a carful of strangers finally stopped, she got in — and she's used the memory in her keynotes ever since, as a lesson about facing the unknown.
"If you have a vehicle and you don't get in, you don't go anywhere. It may not take you where you planned — but it might take you somewhere better."
— Paula C. SnyderFifty years later, she marked the anniversary by driving herself from North Carolina back home to Detroit on her 70th birthday — booking gigs along the way.
The Marriage That Didn't Follow
Years on, Paula had a young daughter, a home in Idaho, and a thriving act: she and her first husband performed together and ran an entertainment agency built, as all her work was, on trust. Then he decided he wanted to "simplify life," moved to the California coast ahead of them, and never really called for his family to join him. She emptied the house while her daughter, barely more than a toddler, wandered among the boxes.
Rather than wait to be sent for, Paula made her own way. Living temporarily with her mother-in-law, she wrote up a side-by-side of her own experience against what a property manager needed — and talked herself into running a 46-unit apartment complex, free rent included. When her husband finally said he was done, she asked one thing: could she take her daughter back to Michigan, to family? He didn't mind.
After her father died in 1992, when her daughter was nine, Paula asked the girl what she thought about a move to North Carolina. Her daughter — no more a follower than her mother — said, "Let's go." They packed the car and the hamster and arrived on Christmas Eve. They've been there ever since.
"As soon as I could get out of that house, I was happy — making my own decisions, and owning them. Leaving home was the most freeing thing for me."
— Paula C. SnyderHer Daughter Called Her Back
For years, music had gone quiet in Paula's own life while she raised her daughter and worked. Then, at sixteen, her daughter — a natural talent who'd always been a bit of a closet singer — invited her in. They sang together. And something Paula had set down came rushing back.
"We harmonized, we blended, we each soloed, and we lifted each other up. And I thought — my God, how could I stay away so long?"
— Paula C. SnyderBuilding It Again, On Her Terms
Nobody called her back when she reached out to the local music scene, so Paula did what she'd always done: she found her own way in. She walked into a nearby senior community, asked what they paid their musicians, and got a chance — which led to a referral down the street, and then another. For years she performed in senior and healthcare settings while holding a full-time job at Disability Determination Services, using the medical knowledge from her OT training and her music both, two sides of one brain.
When she finally retired, she went all in. She became "Grandma Paula" — a full persona, right down to guitar-pick earrings — playing preschools and children's parties. She writes custom poetry, makes and ships her earrings, performs singing telegrams, and, though she'd been writing songs since 1971, began recording in a studio in 2006 to hear her music built as big as she'd always imagined it.
She books in shorter windows now, protective of never letting a client down. But the business is still full, still hers, and still growing new niches — because finding another way to make it work is simply how her mind has always run.
Caregiving, and the Limits That Keep Her Whole
Paula is now the one showing up for a mother who rarely showed up for her. She's the sibling who stayed in-state, the one the family trusts with the job — advocating for her 98-year-old mother and for a husband with medical challenges. She brings real compassion to it, sharpened by decades of playing music in senior care. But she's also learned to set limits: she doesn't live with her mother, she schedules non-emergencies for days that work, and she protects the work that keeps her herself.
The relationship is softer than it was, if not exactly deep. And Paula holds a hard-won clarity about it that took a lifetime to earn.
"She didn't know me. She didn't want to know me. She'd made her decision, and that was it. And now? I'm so strong. I know me."
— Paula C. SnyderWhy This Conversation Matters
Paula C. Snyder was never given permission to be who she was — and became that person anyway, over and over, across seven decades. Her story is a reminder that a creative life isn't a gift that arrives once conditions are right. It's a decision you make in spite of the conditions, and a thing you protect through every interruption, because you understand that letting go of it would be harder to survive than anything else.
As Amanda puts it in her closing: there are so many ways to solve a problem and live the way you want to live. You don't have to do it the way anyone else did. You just have to find your version of still singing.
What's the thing you've kept picking back up your whole life — and what would it mean to protect it now?
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