By Frances Stebbins, Correspondent
[This is a memory from the many decades the author has been privileged to write for daily and weekly newspapers circulating in Western Virginia.]
To me, the most important thing about a church service is the music, followed closely by the sermon.
My love of music goes back to my childhood when my widowed mother, who had no formal musical training but could “carry a tune,” sang to me hymns and the popular songs of her day. Since she was born in the final decade of the 19th Century, that was a long time ago; one never hears those songs today.
{Think of the words of the famed American composer, Stephen Collins Foster, and how racially biased they appear now.}
Several years ago, when she was the director of music at my Salem parish, Rose Ann Burgess of Roanoke County gave me a dilapidated copy of a 1930s music book, “Lorenz’s Select Anthems.” It contains a wealth of old Gospel hymns once popular in American Protestant congregations. I found a few familiar to me from my Mother’s Day. Though with a 1946 copyright, the hymns in this old volume clearly go back to an earlier day.
What musical ability I have comes from my mother’s German Shenandoah Valley ancestors; she told me that my maternal grandfather, Daniel Lichliter, who died several years before I was born, was the bass soloist in the choir of her Presbyterian church at Woodstock, Virginia.
Times were hard in the Valley towns even a generation after the end of the Civil War. My grandparents and their four surviving children lived on a hill with a glorious view of the Massanutten Mountain. The oldest girl, my Aunt Ella who later resided in Tazewell, was given enough music instruction to play an old upright piano at her home. On the annual summer visits my mother and I made to her, evenings were often spent singing the old hymns.
At home in the Piedmont town of Orange, my mother and I would sing on the front porch on summer evenings.
So, I grew up with apparently a good “ear” for remembering tunes and being able to reproduce them on a harmonica – 25 cents in my childhood.
I loved music – though not jazz or grand opera – and now choose the Baroque composers of 500 years ago as my favorites. George Frederick Handel is tops of them all. I’ve requested that his “Royal Fireworks” or perhaps some of “The Water Music” be played at my memorial service.
In the Lorenz Book of Select Anthems are several by a man named George Coles Stebbins. He came from New York State and lived to the age of 99 from 1846 to 1945. He was, apparently, part of the family who emigrated from Germany and England in the earliest years of our nation, for they are known at the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the 1630s. The town they founded shortly afterward, Deerfield, has been restored as a sort of Massachusetts Williamsburg which late husband Charlie and I visited some 30 years ago.
The hymn writer, George Stebbins, a farmer in his youth, migrated to Chicago and eventually joined the evangelistic team of Dwight L. Moody and Ira Sankey after he joined a musical community in the West.
When the late pastor, James deFoe, long associated with Melrose Baptist Church in Northwest Roanoke, opened a bookstore as a retirement hobby years ago, he gave me a copy of a book about the hymn writer which incorporated some reminiscences.
Probably the best-known Stebbins hymn is “Wonderful Words of Life” which I recall hearing in many an evangelical Christian church in my years as Religion Writer for the daily Roanoke newspapers.
Newsman husband Charlie was interested in his ancestor-cousin, but he did not inherit the musical gifts; in fact, his likely comment about the music at our church was that the Noack pipe organ, installed 25 years ago as an anonymous gift, was “too loud.”
One of the great pleasures of my career has been to know Richard Cummins, a well-respected organist, composer and choir director in the Roanoke area for many decades. Now 85 and with his singer wife Rita in good health living in Southwest Roanoke, Cummins has been part of my professional newswriting career since 1952.
At that time, shortly after our marriage when Charlie and I both held jobs on newspapers in the Southside Virginia city of Petersburg, Cummins, as a teenager, was already playing the organ at a Baptist church in his home community. As a young reporter, I heard of his talent and interviewed him.
Several decades later, I discovered that he had found a job in downtown Roanoke’s prestigious Greene Memorial United Methodist Church. There he instituted an organ concert series with guest performers which continued for decades and was widely popular until the veteran musician was forced into retirement.
The manner of his leaving was widely resented by many musical folk of the parish who went elsewhere. Today, he told me recently, he’s still filling in fairly often at local congregations and events. I’m enjoying several compact discs made of the musical couple’s early years together.
