VIDEO: The Singing Transporter

Lindon Beckford is a talented singer with the most unique stage – the corridors of a hospital, where he works as a transport worker. He used to sing live on actual stages, but his overwhelming anxiety forced him to give that up. So now, while he moves patients from one room to another, he soothes their nerves and heals their souls with the dulcet sound of his voice.

Read the full story below, provided by statnews.nte.

Nervous patients heading into surgery at one Boston hospital may get an extra dose of pre-op medicine: a serenade from transport worker Lindon Beckford. That is, if he can just calm his own nerves first.

Nervous patients heading into surgery at one Boston hospital may get an extra dose of pre-op medicine: a serenade from transport worker Lindon Beckford. That is, if he can just calm his own nerves first.

Beckford spends his days wheeling patients around Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a 672-bed hospital in the Longwood Medical Area. Over the past three decades, he has become known for filling the hallways with song. His melodies have caught the attention of hospital staff, who have featured his performances in an employee orientation video and even called on him to sing to a patient who was about to die.

Beckford, 52, does this while battling his own condition, anxiety and panic attacks that can make it hard to sing. His stage is a network of hospital corridors and patient rooms, which he traverses for eight hours a day in a blue hospital uniform and bright white sneakers.

He sings while rolling patients into surgery, delivering wheelchairs, fetching broken equipment, and taking blood and urine samples to the lab. He sings gospel, love songs, and country music classics from Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, and Charley Pride. Sometimes he hums his own reggae songs in a genre called “lovers rock.” The only time he doesn’t sing, he said, is when he has to take a body to the morgue.

Beckford, who lives with his wife and two kids in the Boston neighborhood of Roslindale, has been singing ever since he was a little boy growing up in Jamaica. He used to perform live in nightclubs in Massachusetts and Maine, but had to stop due to panic attacks on stage. After joining the hospital in 1985, he began to sing on the job. First he sang just to comfort himself and piece together original melodies. Then people started to notice. So he started singing to them, not just to himself.

While they aren’t ordered up on an official hospital prescription, Beckford’s serenades can offer patients a kind of inner therapy that’s missing from drugs and surgeries — one that can help patients heal better. Studies have shown that music reduces stress and boosts mood and immunity. And improving patients’ moods as they head into the operating room may improve post-surgical outcomes.

“A doctor has his part to play, a nurse has her part … I’ve got my part to play,” Beckford said in an interview in the hospital’s basement breakroom.

Not every patient wants to hear music, though, so Beckford asks first.

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