Personal History IV. Music in My Life

IV. Music in My Life
    I had an early fascination with music and things that make music.  Thinking back about something that happened when I was a small boy makes me think I was attracted to music and almost felt an entitlement to anything that produced music.  I was young when World War II began.  Sometime in 1942, my uncle Rodney volunteered to serve in the Military.  He had a talent for music and played the reed instruments, saxophone and clarinet, expertly.  They were living in Bingen, and he had his own dance band, the Columbians, who played for dances in the small towns up and down the Columbia River.  His band had a thirtyish “Big Band” sound on the order of the Dorsey brothers.  Through his dance band, he had become acquainted with Doc Severinson (Johnny Carson’s band leader) who was raised in Arlington, Oregon, and he took some credit for helping Doc get started in his musical career.  At some point later, I understand that Doc invited Rodney to come to Los Angeles to be a part of his band, but Rodney turned him down believing that this would not be a good way to raise a family.
    Just before Rodney joined the military, he was still single.  His father (my grandfather, Frank Davenport) had recently sold his house in Bingen and moved to Utah, so Rodney had no place to store his musical instruments.  We had a couch in our living room with a large storage area  under the cushion.  My mother volunteered to keep Rodney’s sax and clarinet while he was away and store them in this couch. During the 3 years before Rodney reclaimed them, those instruments seemed to keep calling to me, wanting to be played.  I was especially attracted to the saxaphone and thought it made such beautiful sounds.  But my mother would not let me touch these instruments.  At age 6 or 7, I just could not understand why I was forbidden to try them out.  I has this calling to produce music.  But there was no give in my mother’s prohibition, so I had to be patient.  As it turned out, I never did get to learn the saxophone.
    We got a lot of music in our home.  We always had a piano, and we sang a lot.  Although my mother didn’t play the piano or any instruments, she had a nice alto voice and knew how to harmonize or make up an alto part if a group were singing.  Occasionally she would sing duets or with a small group on special church or community occasions.  She also led the singing for many years in the Sunday School of the Glenwood church.  She and my dad also knew lots of songs, which we would sing on family nights (like Sunday evenings) or as we were traveling someplace in our car.  We had a game we played.  Someone would say “Let’s sing all the songs we know about the moon.”  Someone would start to sing “Looziana Moon, I’m Lonely” or “Moon Over Miami” and we would just keep going until we couldn’t think of any more.   Then some one would say another topic and would take off again with songs on the new subject.  Some of the topics, I recall, included national anthems, songs that mention states, songs that mention other countries, cowboy songs, songs that mention animals, etc. 
    When my dad was young adult age, there was fad about the mandolin.  My dad go himself on and taught himself to play.   He often played his mandolin, sometimes alone and sometimes he and I played together, my chording on the piano to accompany him.  I think Dorothy took lessons, and could play some things on the piano.
    My mother enjoyed serious music also.  Elsewhere I have noted that she tried to acquire some records of classical pieces and that we often had a radio opera broadcast turned on on Saturdays.  My favorite music for listening is symphonic.
    I had hoped to help my chldren learn to appreciate all kinds of music including serious classical.  One of my strategies was to have available in our home, following the pattern of my mother, records and tapes of serious music, especially symphonic.  One idea we tried was to designate a week for a Beethoven or Tchaikovsky festival, and that be the only music that was heard in the home.  I would try to play all of the symphonies of these composers during the at times when most of the family was home.
    As I reported earlier, during my first year in school, my mother arranged for me to take piano lessons.  But I could not seem to remember to run back into the school for the lesson when there was ball to be played with my friends.  I guess that baseball also had a way of calling to me.
    My next big step in music happened one day as we were in our car traveling some place as a family, when I was about 7 or 8 years old.  I can almost place the spot where it happened, somewhere along the wooded hillside south of Conboy Lake in Glenwood valley as we were on the road to BZ Corners and White Salmon.  My parents knew lots of songs from their youths and from their families of origin, and we often would sing them together as we traveled in our car.  Singing together as we traveled was also a ploy that my mother used to keep Dorothy and me from squabbling or teasing each other, which made my dad nervous and grouchy while he was driving.  So the result was that we sang a lot while going places as a family.  We were singing a song called “Now is the Hour” (Maori Farewell).  All of a sudden, in a flash, I could hear a harmony part in my mind, which I began to sing.  From that day to this, I have always been able to compose harmony parts for songs, on the fly, by ear.
    Although I never was given further opportunity to study the piano with an instructor, I began to take a further interest in that instrument.  Our family had inherited the Davenport family piano, when my Grandpa Davenport broke up housekeeping after the death of his wife, my Grandmother Kate.  This piano had a deep, rich tone and had been owned by the Lufkins in Logan.  It was the piano that Grandma Kate used before she married and then inherited, and I understand played very well.  Angela currently has it in her possession.  My mother brought it with her, when she and my dad moved to Ogden from Washington state.  After my dad passed away and my mother moved into an upstairs bedroom at Dorothy’s place in South Weber, Dorothy and I divided up the two big items of her furniture, Dorothy getting the big dining table with the lion feet and I got the piano.  Later, we got another piano, and I gave this piano to Angela who didn’t have one at the time.
    My major piano accomplishment during my middle childhood years was teaching myself how to chord.  I learned to play a 2-octave base note with my left hand on the downbeat, and an associated chord with the right hand on the other beats.  My dad liked to play along with me.  As a young man, he had learned to play the melody for a lot of pieces on the mandolin.  He would carry the melody and I would provide the accompaniment on the piano.  We played songs that had been popular during his youth, southern folk songs, Christmas songs and hymns that he knew, mostly southern Protestant.  It got so that the two of us sometimes did special musical numbers at programs at the Glenwood church.  A couple of our favorites were hill-billy hymns “When the Roll Is Called Yonder (I’ll Be There)” and “Life Is like a Mountain Railway.”
    While at home, I also learned basics of some of the stringed instruments.  As a teenager, I had access to a guitar and my Dad’s mandolin.  I learned how to finger the basic guitar chords and played some on the mandolin.  Although the mandolin seemed to largely be designed for playing the melodies and I never got to the point where I could do this as well as my dad, I taught myself basic chords and could strum it and make it sound something like a ukelele.
    When I was in the eighth grade the Glenwood Schools began a new emphasis on music.  The school board hired an experienced musical director, Orin Fjeran, and he began programs in both band and choral music.  The director began the program by inviting interested young people and their parents to a big meeting where he laid out his plans.  Families were given some opportunities to choose the instruments they would like to learn, and the invitation to participate was extended clear down to the middle elementary classes including Dorothy.  Here was my chance to live out my dream to play like my uncle Rodney and Jimmy Dorsey.   But no, my parents said that a saxophone would be way too expensive.  All that they could afford would be trumpets for Dorothy and me.  Somewhere they found a used one for Dorothy and they ordered the cheapest one they could find in the Sears & Roebuck catalog for me.  So, both Dorothy and I were in the brass section.  For most of my time in the Glenwood band, I was in the First trumpet section. 
    Our band started playing at high school music festivals across the State. And we soon had our own uniform, which was Levis, a Levi jacket, and a red bandana around our neck.  Eventually we held fund-raisers and we able to buy full-fledged band uniforms, black pants, red jackets, and caps like army captains, to match our school colors.  We also learned some about playing our music while marching, by tramping up and down the Glenwood main street during band time practicing our music.
    Although we had our personal instruments, Mr. Fjerin also was able to find some funds for some of the more exotic instruments.  I got to try all of the other brass instruments, alto horn, French horn, baritone horn, tuba, and could play them except I never learned the slide positions on a trombone.  Eventually Mr. Fjerin left and was replaced by Paul McNutt, who served both as Superintendent of Schools and also director of the music program.  Both were expert musicians and musical directors and I learned much from them both.  At one point, Dr. McNutt taught a music theory class for a term that I really enjoyed and incorporated into my understanding of music.  Among other things, I remember that we studied about harmony and musical arrangement, and also the physics of musical sound.
    After several years,  the band was able to acquire a Sousaphone (you know, an oversized tuba, with a large bell and tubing that wraps around your shoulder), and I was offered the opportunity to play it in my Junior and Senior years, which was quite fun.  A highlight of my senior year was playing a Sousaphone solo in a piece we performed at a high school music festival in Ellensburg, Washington.  I doubt if very many people could put this on their musical resume.
    Dr. McNutt had had a lot a of experience in choral directing and led both the choir at Glenwood High School, but he also started a youth choir at the Glenwood Church.  In the process, he introduced us to some of the wonderful religious choral literature.
    When I got to college, a whole new world of vocal music opened up to me.  It started sometime in the fall in my freshman year in the Provo Edgemont ward we were attending.  At that time, there were no young singles ward, so I and my roommates were going to a regular family ward a couple of miles north of campus.  One Sunday, the announcement was made that they were organizing a ward choir and wanted volunteers.  I thought I could do that, so showed up at the appointed time for choir practice.  The choir director was Ralph Woodward, who was also a new member of the BYU choral music faculty.  I probably was introduced to him and rest of the choir as a new freshman BYU student.  He had each of us vocalize a line or two of a hymn, then worked with us on a piece of music.  Afterward choir he called me over and suggested that I drop into his campus office and he could give me some tips to help my singing. 
    In a few days, I sought him out in his Lower Campus office (the building that now houses the Provo City Library).  He listened again to my attempt to sing, and then suggested that I might start voice lessons with him.  We were on the quarter system then and it was time to register for Winter classes, so I signed up for private voice lessons from Brother Woodward.  At the same time, he also invited me to register for the Mens Chorus, which he was directing.  Thus began a long, growing, and satisfying relationship.  I learned that Dr. (Brother) Woodward was a recent convert to the Church, through his wife Margaret, who as I recall he had met originally while both were students at some kind of music institute back east.  Sometimes she soloed with our choir and had a wonder bell-toned soprano voice. 
    In addition to having several years of private voice lessons with Brother Woodward, I also sang in his university choirs for almost six years.  I traveled with the Mens Chorus on tours of New Mexico and Arizona and later to Edmonton, Alberta.  I remember a short tour in which we sang at Spanish Fork, Payson, and Juab high schools.  Occasionally Brother Woodward invited me to solo.  I had acquired a guitar and sometimes did folk songs.  Our little choir tour to high schools was during JoAnn’s senior high school year and I sang a folk song with guitar accompaniment for her student body.  She didn’t recall my song (I am certain that she must have skipped the performance), but I remembered becoming acquainted afterwards with some student body leaders (who were cousins) J. Preston Hughes and Bob Hughes.  JoAnn mentioned a funny(?) experience with the former in her Personal History book on page VI-8.  When JoAnn and I returned to Spanish Fork from Detroit, we were in the same ward as Bob’s dad, who helped us by giving me some temporary employment with his dairy, with a milk delivery route.  Wendy and I are now acquainted with Bob again because he lives in a neighboring Spanish Fork ward in our stake and serves with us in the Payson temple. 
    I also served as Mens Chorus president for one year.
    In term of the relative status of BYU choirs, our Mens Chorus was good but somewhat down in the choir “pecking order” for the school  We were about third in on an elitism scale, below the Madrigals and the A Capella choirs, and a little above the University Chorale.  Sometimes we combined for performances with the Women’s Chorus which Brother Woodward also conducted, so we got some experience with a large two gender choir.  Later in his career, Brother Woodward advanced upward to be able to conduct the A Capella choir.
    In the music we performed, there was a lot of emphasis on traditional religious choral music.  Brother Woodward taught us to feel and emphasize the spiritual message as we sang.  He helped me to love the singing of Handel’s Messiah.  I had a special feeling about the choruses, especially the ones based upon Isaiah’s prophecy of the atonement.  “Surely he has born our griefs, and carried our sorrows...”  The tones were so somber and harmonies even dissonant, and I could feel the Savior’s pain deeply.  Then right in the middle of this horrible dirge, there was a distinct break and change into a light and airy and bouncy mode.  “All we like sheep, are gone astray ay ay a, are gone astray ay ay a, are gone astray ay ay, ay ay, ay ay a a a .”  I got a sense from the music of how lightly we took Christ’s suffering for us, how shallow were our values.  In my mind, I saw little sheep dancing and frolicking in their pasture land with no concerns for the momentous things around them.  And then the music turned again to the most somber and dissonant and growly passage in the entire piece (the entire world of music?), “And the Lord has laid on him, the iniquities of us all.”  I could sense that even in our shallow appreciation of the gospel, God still loved us, and the atonement was worked out and available to bless us.
    One of the blessings of BYU choir singing for a little farm boy who came from far away from the Church’s center, was that our BYU choirs combined to sing at General Conference a couple of times.  I took that as an amazing privilege, sitting in choir seats in the famous old Tabernacle, usually occupied by the famous Tabernacle Choir with the famous organ as our accompaniment.
    I also sang with Brother Woodward at least one more year, after college.  After we had returned from Detroit, and I obtained work with the Utah Division of Family Services and we were living in Orem, and was then working on my MSW degree and was commuting to the U, I learned that he had formed something called the Ralph Woodward Chorale.  So I volunteered.  It drew on community persons, not students, and particularly Utah county music professionals, for membership.  I probably was one of the few persons in the choir not working in the music field.  In fact, Margaret Woodward with her trained operatic voice was one of the sopranos.  We did our performances in the old Provo Tabernacle.  The highlight for that winter was our performance of The Messiah in the Provo Tabernacle (now Provo City Center Temple building), using some of the latest and best scholarship about how it was originally performed, especially as a small chamber choir, not a massive choral group. 
    Late in my BYU undergraduate time, I took a class for religion credit in church choir conducting.  I had the chance to apply these things shortly after we moved our family to Taylorsville.  I was called by our Bishopric to be the ward choir director.  Our ward had a tradition of good choirs, and singing interesting music, and I tried to apply everything I had ever learned about good choir singing.  As I think back, I remember this calling as being one of the most challenging if not frightening positions that ever served in.  When the choir is performing, you stand with your back to the congregation and are responsible for everything the choir does.  If you make a mistake, you have no idea how the listeners are reacting.  But this calling was also satisfying, when the musical production was good and especially when the choir members were feeling the spiritual impact of the music.
    What skills did I develop through all of this choral music experience?  I think I developed into a good sight-reader, as good as any professional music person in the Ralph Woodward Chorale.  I could sing on pitch.  I learned a lot about word pronunciation and enunciation, so that what comes across to audiences is understood and sounds attractive.  What part did I sing?  The answer is, when a young man and when my voice was fully conditioned I could sing all men's parts.  I had at least a two octave range for choir singing, from F or G below the bass clef to G above middle C.  I think my singing range was truly right in the middle.  I could not sing a real rich low G and I had to stretch to hit the high G, or slide into falsetto.  I typically sang bass in choirs with women, but in male groups baritone or second tenor.  In the last few years in church choirs I have usually sung bass, because I have had a persistent nasal condition that hinders me singing high notes softly.
    Occasionally in the wards in which I have resided, I had the chance to solo in sacrament meetings, or to sing in a quartet for some service.  I guess I would have liked to have had more of these opportunities.
    Here are some other musical items in my life.  The summer that I was anticipating a mission call (1957), I thought that there might be some point in the mission where it would be helpful to be able to play the piano for hymn-singing.  So in my spare time, I went completely through the Church hymnbook of that day, to be able to play all the hymns on the piano.  At this time (age 83) I probably still could stumble through, hopefully with a little practice, playing most of the hymns for singing, at a level that would be good enough for a priesthood group.  Now I still play the piano occasionally for my own enjoyment, but largely by ear.
    Starting when I was in college, I developed an interest in folk music, with several dimensions.  First, it was part of the southern heritage received from my father.  I found a book by Burl Ives which was a collection American or Southern folk songs and learned to sing many of them, with my own guitar accompaniment.  I also discovered an interest in folk songs and early hymns of our Church.  I took a special interest in what we called Grandpa Davenport’s (actually my great-grandfather, Jeremiah Franklin Davenport) song, thought to be a composite of 18th century folk music sung by members of the family or Church.  I learned this song from my mother and have promoted its use by our Lewis family.  My freshman year at BYU, I had an English teacher, Thomas Cheney, who was a collector of Mormon folk-songs, and I recorded this song for his collection.  Accessing local bookstores, I acquired a collection of early church hymnals, and taught myself a number of hymns that are no longer in the current hymnbook, but that seemed to tell the story of the earlier Church.  During the time we lived in Taylorsville, from those old hymn books and from Dr. Cheney’s collection, I prepared a fireside program which I presented on a couple of occasions, and sang with attendees these wonderful old hymns plus folk music that was a part of our Church heritage, accompanying the group on my guitar.
    The husband of the family that we purchased our Taylorsville house from was a violinist in the Utah Symphony.  As part of the purchase arrangement, we were to pay off a loan they had acquired to make an earlier addition to the house.  He had a second job working in the shop and store of a violin maker, which was in downtown Salt Lake only three or four blocks way from my office.  Every month, I would walk over to his shop with a check.  One day, knowing that I was interested in music, he presented me with a kit for constructing a folk instrument, called a Mountain Dulcimer, which a customer had partly finished and then returned.  I gladly accepted this gift, completed the construction, and then taught myself how to play it.  It was an interesting little instrument from the mountain South.  It had a neck and frets like a guitar, but tuned quite differently.  It had four strings.  The bottom two were drone strings, always played with the same notes, a bass note and its fifth tone above.  The top two strings (toward the musician) were tuned the same, like on a mandolin, and played the melody.  With the instrument on his/her lap or in front of him/her, the player used a short wooden dowel (called a “Noter”) to depress only the melody strings as needed to play the tune.  The right hand either held and used a pick or   strummed with the thumb all of the strings rhythmically.  The musical production was somewhat like a bagpipe, with the drone strings always playing the same basic chord. 
    My Mountain Ducimer repertoire never got very large.  It was “Amazing Grace,” Marching Through Georgia,” and “Scotland the Brave.”  The instrument hangs on our living room wall as decoration.
    Occasionally, I would compose songs of my own.  I wrote three songs for JoAnn in a folk song style, when we were courting and engaged, “I’m in Love with Joann,” “I Have a Fair Love,” and “What If My Love Were Here Beside Me?”  JoAnn’s brother Allen was helpful and took the lead in creating a surprise broadcast of these songs in the recreation hall during our wedding reception.  (By the way, we still see that church building, the Spanish Fork West Stakehouse, whenever we are heading to I-15 or to shopping at Macy’s or Costco.  Another famous person, one of the Osmond brothers, also had their wedding reception in this building a few years after ours.)
    When the children came along, I began to write little (sometimes nonsense) songs to sing with them or help them to learn: “Talk to the Doggie,” “Where Is Your Nose?,” “What Does the Doggie Say?,” “Who Loves You?,” “The Ants Come Crawling,” “I Am Getting Bigger,” “I Want to Be a Happy Child.”  In 1967, I wrote “We Are the Lewis Family,” which we have used as a sort of family theme song ever since.  And I love the parodies that each sub-family added for a recent Lewis Family Camp.
    Later I wrote a song (1975) for a stake road show with an American liberty theme, “Freedom’s Song,” which our older girls helped present as an interlude number between each ward act.
    I also composed several pieces with a religious focus. There were three Christmas songs,  “Oh Beautiful Night,” which depicts the beauty and glory of the night when the Savior was born, and “How Strange That Angels Would Appear,” which portrays the miraculous birth of Christ against the background of doubting and prideful Israel, and “The Time Cometh Quickly,” whose language emphasizes Book of Mormon prophecies of Christ’s birth (Mosiah 3:5-8, Alma 7:10-15).
     “O God, We Take of Emblems Bless’d” was a sacramental hymn I composed that speaks of the atonement and our dependence on the grace of God, and of a future time when the saints of every age, hopefully including myself and members of our family, will take the sacrament together with the Savior, through the blessing of the sealing power of the priesthood (D&C 27:5-14).
    “A Few Years Ago I Left My Heavenly Home,” speaks of the doctrine of the great plan of salvation, of our pre-existence, and  the purposes of our earth-life, all with a strong beat.  And it sound just like Elvis could have sung it.
    David, Emilie, and Scott helped me to record all of these songs and hymns, and save them to our family Google site We are the Lewis Family.