Yvonne Allu, RN, DC, staff nurse in Eskenazi Health Family Beginnings, has been gifted with two careers: one in music and the other in medicine.

She grew up in a big St. Louis family who were immersed in folk, rock, classical music, rhythm and blues and jazz. As a young girl, Allu says, “there was music all around me.” During her teens she began to sing at weddings and with a band.

The pull toward medicine was equally strong, however. As an eleven-year-old, Allu had volunteered in a hospital. While visiting with patients, she had discovered that “presence and touch is healing,” she says, and it was “something that came as naturally as my voice comes out of my body.”

Allu chose to pursue her health career first. After earning a degree in biology, she began working in the medical field, soon becoming a manager of a women’s health clinic. Once she earned a doctorate in chiropractic medicine, Allu started her own holistic healing practice in Indianapolis, which included ear acupuncture and cupping as well as chiropractic work.

Singing professionally remained an ambition for Allu, but it was always something she would get to at some later date. After all, her life had become full over the years between her work and commitments to her husband, Tunde; her stepchildren; and her family back in St. Louis.

The tragic loss of one of her brothers to a motorcycle accident in 2009, however, made Allu “rethink a lot of things,” she says. “What’s important in life. How short life is.” His loss became the catalyst for her music career. She began singing professionally by 2010, progressing to become a headliner at multiple popular venues in Indianapolis. By the next year, Allu had completed her first album.

For Allu, medicine and music are inextricably linked. While continuing to heal others in her holistic practice, Allu relished giving something of herself to crowds as a lead vocalist. Listeners would often approach her after performances to thank her for soothing their pains or reviving memories connected to a song. Allu says she believes that the good feeling her music can evoke in her audience “in and of itself is healing.”

Convinced she should expose bigger audiences to the educational and therapeutic benefits of music, Allu says she put on shows in 2015, 2016 and 2017 through grants she won for a small foundation. One of these was a 1940s USO (United Service Organizations)-style camp show at Fort Harrison, complete with a 14-piece band, stand-ins for Bob Hope and The Andrews Sisters (of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” fame) and dance lessons for the audience on period choreography. Allu wanted to honor veterans and remind audiences that music therapy has long been a valued part of our history.

With the pandemic came changes in Allu’s career. Since her parents were beginning to require Allu’s caregiving, she needed greater flexibility in her schedule. She scaled back her holistic practice and taught anatomy and physiology online to nursing students. Knowing that experience in a hospital would enrich her nursing instruction, she also took classes toward her own nursing degree to achieve that clinical background.

Allu also finished Clymate Change, a new album, in 2020. She’d been working on it for years, writing songs and collaborating with multiple local musicians. After she began recording it in 2017, she experienced several losses in quick succession: her stepfather, aunt, sister and nephew. Creating music for the album helped her cope with her grief. She also found solace a few years after producing the album in a new career as a nurse at Eskenazi Health Family Beginnings. “I think it was a natural thing for me to come to Family Beginnings,” says Allu, “where I’m seeing life.”

Today Allu continues to pursue both her health and music careers, fulfilling the two sides of her identity. She’s been a resident artist at The Jazz Kitchen and sung at The Chatterbox Jazz Club, Cabaret, Feinstein’s at Hotel Carmichael, the Artsgarden, the Indy Jazz Festival and many other venues and events. She performs with her band — which has gone by Yvonne Allu & Co. and Yvonne and Company — and as a featured artist for others.

“All my life and I guess who I am is a healer,” Allu says, “and whether I’m doing that through providing patient care at Family Beginnings or singing and healing somebody’s soul, for me, that’s just who I am and what I choose to give.”