Talkin' Music - Episode 2: Taking Root, Voices Heard, Part 2

Fri, 03/28/2025 - 6:30am

When: March 28, 2025

In this episode, we continue to be inspired by Dr. Patterson’s journey through life and music, from imitating singers he heard on the radio to introducing audiences to new genres. He shares his passion for community and dedication to African American choral music, particularly Spirituals.

Transcript

• [00:00:02] INTRO: [MUSIC]
• [00:00:27] JEFFREY PICKELL: Welcome to Talkin' Music: Celebrating 50+ Years of the Willis C. Patterson Our Own Thing Chorale. I'm your host Jeffrey Pickell. In this episode, we will explore numerous topics, including more of Dr. Patterson's life from childhood in Ann Arbor to his growth to intellectual and musical prominence. We will explore factors that help shape this gifted, creative, and risk-taking man. Let's go back a little more in time to the roots of Dr. Patterson, before he was a doctor, little Dr. Patterson, little Willis, when he was in his young age before he became a singer and a teacher and a performer. What was Ann Arbor like in the '30s and '40s?
• [00:01:27] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: Ann Arbor, as I suggested earlier, was a very difficult place for all portions of its population, primarily because of the Great Depression. Ann Arbor was, and as is now the case, the main location of the campus of the University of Michigan. The University of Michigan pervaded almost all activities in Ann Arbor. As opposed to Ypsilanti and Monroe that were part of the industrial complex of the area. Ann Arbor had no factories, no automobile factories. It had one camera factory. It was--for the Black population, small Black population--a rather extreme example of the Depression. Ann Arbor tried its best to be a version of the contemporary times that was an improvement over the extreme social conditions that existed in Detroit and Ypsilanti and Chicago. But it did not have the supportive industries to provide a growth of population that reflected the African Americans in education and in other professions. We were a small community with domestics, few craftsmen, but by and large, the main staple of sustenance, financial and social sustenance, was provided by the building that is now still standing in Ann Arbor, just off of Ann Street. It was the Colored Welfare League. That building's still there. It's just off the corner of Fourth and Ann Street. It provided a place where the African Americans who were seeking employment could come and wait for persons to come by and say, we'd like to hire you for a day to do yard work or whatever other work, and they would go out and lend their services for a day. There were a few professionals. In fact, one doctor and one lawyer, Dr. Raglan and Dr. Nixon. The doctor and the lawyer couldn't make and couldn't earn a living out of their profession, even though they were University of Michigan graduates. The African American community could not provide enough business for them, or if they could provide enough business for them, they couldn't afford the fees two professionals had to charge in order to earn a reasonable living. The only other professionals at that time were the preachers. These were the prime professionals in Ann Arbor. Few craftsmen, yet this was a very depressed population.
• [00:04:10] JEFFREY PICKELL: How did they shape your life in any way, in terms of your awareness and your ability to sing? Did the church have an influence in that at all?
• [00:04:21] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: Yes. My mother was a very talented singer. She didn't know it. She was not a trained singer, but she had a beautiful voice. I had been born under very severe circumstances that caused me to be very delayed in my development. She had been hit by a motorcycle on the corner of Main and Huron Street, where she had gone to interview for a job in one of the buildings there. She stepped out in, I think she was maybe in her fifth or sixth or seventh month of pregnancy with me and was hit by a motorcycle, and it caused her to have a broken jaw, and she was unable to eat any solid foods. The doctors took her to the University Hospital, wired her jaw closed. She could only eat liquid foods. But she could not talk at all for the remainder of her pregnancy with me. Result was I was born breach. I was an incubator baby. The doctors had given up on me. They said, "He's not going to survive." My grandmother was a domestic at the time, came and said, "Give the boy to me." She took me home, fed me out of a thimble eye dropper and with the collard green soup and mush cornbread mixed with mother's milk. She fed me several times a day with this. She said after about three weeks, that boy commenced to growin'. My favorite food has been collard greens and cornbread, right up to today.
• [00:05:57] JEFFREY PICKELL: You didn't, though, come out of the womb, excuse the expression, and sing instantly? [LAUGHTER]
• [00:06:03] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: No. I was inspired by my mother. I should say that the impact of my birth had me pretty much isolated from my contemporaries. I was, for all intents and purposes, handicapped. I really spent most of my developing years with my mother, and she'd have the radio on and be listening to singers, Ethel Waters and Nelson Eddy, and Paul Robeson and all that. I'd sit there and listen to them in the radio and I come to find out that I really liked what I was hearing, so I tried to imitate them. It was, I think, a designation by the Almighty, that this is the way this boy should be saved. By saved I don't mean saving my soul, but saving my existence. I became very, very attached to my own instrument. I think I liked my mother's voice the best, but I couldn't sing like her because she was a soprano. I grew into singing as a result of imitation of those voices like Billy Eckstine, Bing Crosby, and all sorts. [MUSIC]
• [00:07:55] JEFFREY PICKELL: You weren't a bass, though, when you were 4 years old.
• [00:07:59] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: Well, I was not a bass. A boy soprano until I got into Jones School, and suddenly I felt my voice not able to do what it had previously done for me, and I found myself in the cellar singing bass. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I sang a song, "Asleep in the Deep," in the ninth grade in Jones School. If you're familiar with the "Asleep in the Deep," and you may very well not, it ends on a low F, and I shall never forget an assembly in which I was asked to sing that song that ends on a step-wise descent to that low F. My mother attended that assembly, and every time I'd go, "B-B-B." She followed me down to the low F, and then I saw beam in her face, as if to say, "He got there," and it was an audible sound. She was one of my best fans.
• [00:08:59] JEFFREY PICKELL: I think you've had many fans since then, too, right?
• [00:09:01] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: I've been lucky. [MUSIC]
• [00:09:43] JEFFREY PICKELL: Welcome back to Talkin' Music. You've been listening to a composition performed by the Chorale; we hope you've enjoyed it. Now, back to the podcast. For a little break, non-difficult questions, or maybe more difficult than they seem. Do you have a favorite song, a song that you love. When you get up in the morning, you say, "there's one song I've always loved."
• [00:10:08] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: No, there's not one. I wake up in the morning, and very often, it can come to me from either the body of some literature of Roger Quilter or of Howard Swanson. I just don't have any favorites. I have too many favorites to try to enumerate. When I nap in the afternoon, I like to put on the song called "Song Without Words" composed by the late Charles Brown. Just a fabulous song, and that's probably my favorite non-verbal song.
• [00:10:46] JEFFREY PICKELL: Genre would be the same thing, too, the genre, jazz, spiritual?
• [00:10:54] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: Yes, jazz is one of my favorite song forms, and I must say that it propelled me into a mindset that said, how can I make this song as pleasurable to sing, or an aria, for that matter, as pleasurable to sing as singing jazz was for me. This opened a whole new vista. I inserted into my performance by habit a need to feel as at home in that aria as I did in jazz or singing a spiritual. I've always advocated that your training is not complete if you have not had a real soulful experience with spirituals or jazz and let it personify in your singing of art songs, French art songs, German art songs, oratorio, opera.
• [00:11:50] JEFFREY PICKELL: Do you ever combine your gift for singing jazz with your gift for singing spirituals together? You ever able to combine those sounds?
• [00:12:02] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: I don't think this is a direct answer to your question, but I made it a habit of, especially in concerts that I gave here at the University of Michigan, to start with operatic areas or whatever, insert at various places jazz or spirituals. Most often, African American singers felt the necessity of putting spirituals on the end, and I did that for a long time. But then I began to mix it up, I'd do a German art song that was very languid and placid and what have you and then I'd follow it up with "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child." I just enjoy doing that, and it was not a favorite practice that some of my colleagues thought it was proper, but I did it anyway. [MUSIC]
• [00:13:33] JEFFREY PICKELL: You made the audience probably like it better, too.
• [00:13:36] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: I always got good audience response.
• [00:13:39] JEFFREY PICKELL: Here's a question I always wanted to know in terms of the chorale itself, what do you see as the future of spirituals in the wake of the gospel revolution? Maybe a little description of the difference between gospel and spirituals.
• [00:13:53] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: For me, gospel gives free reign to improvisation. It's a church song style, and to gospelize a church hymn is the essential ingredient for gospel music, through improvisation and to know few bounds to that spirit of improvisation, sometimes taken to excessive ends. I used to say that it endangered the vocal instrument. But I've had to back off of that because there are gospel singers who've had long successful careers singing gospel music, who have suffered nary a physical embodiment in their instrument. Whereas there are many singers who sung only or predominantly Western music and have suffered great injury to their instrument. I'm sure that's because of the poor technique. But to hold on to the old saying that gospel music is possibly a potential ruination of the instrument is something I've had to back off. A couple of white singers who study with me who've made their entire career-long careers out of singing their version of gospel music and improvising to the nth degree on it. There's an awful lot about the vocal instrument we don't understand yet. I've always felt that spirituals contain soulfulness and an opportunity to be very introspective in their delivery in ways that are very comparable to German lieder--to Schubert songs and Wolf songs and Strauss songs. There's a certain soulfulness of expression that is combined with the tendency to color the vocal sounds that you make, right across the board, German lieder and spirituals. But I must say, I've also found that to be the case with certain French lieders, although they tend to be a little more artsy, French chansons tend to be a little less permissive of that soulfulness, but only a little.
• [00:16:15] JEFFREY PICKELL: That's interesting. I've never heard it described that way. When you think about all the music that you've done in your life and when you've taught the chorale, the songs that you've given them to learn, what are some of the favorite songs that you've ever done with them? Things that you want to do over and over again in each new generation of singer that has come about you wanted to share with them.
• [00:16:40] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: Golly, I'm trying I'm trying to think of the name of the song. I can only hear the tune in my mind: "Lord I will lift mine eyes to the hills. Knowing my help is coming..." "Total Praise." It delivers vocally, harmonically, and textually such a wonderful set of messages simultaneously, and it's almost a complete rendition of the raison d'etra for choral singing. Then of course, one of the most difficult songs that we did was the--and I can't even remember. It's Adolphus Hailstork's--golly, I can't think of the name. No. But it's the Adolphus Hailstork. We spent a lot of time learning it. "Singing my song. I'm singing my song. I'm singing my song." I thought that song was a blessing for the chorale because the text, of course, is the about singing songs. But the intricacies of the pattern of sectional inwards and outwards and all that is in itself a lesson of assurance to the singers in the chorale. They start off by saying, "Oh, this is too difficult. There's nothing I can do with it." And after a lengthy period of time of learning they have some sense of accomplishment. "Wow, and this is such a joy to sing."
• [00:18:09] JEFFREY PICKELL: Yeah, in general, your chorale then has a wide variety of complexity of both songs that are simple to learn and very harmonic and songs that are difficult to learn that we master through your support and direction. Is there any song that we ever did that you felt was not able to be done?
• [00:18:29] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: We had to throw in the towel on the "Toussaint L'Overture," which is a marvelous piece of choral writing, but it was just a little outside of our reach, not a little, quite a bit outside of our reach.
• [00:18:44] JEFFREY PICKELL: Yeah, I think we could have done it sometime. I noticed that over the years, you've done other songs and other things to attempt us to sing outside the box. Many of them have worked quite well. We've done many songs that are not only spiritual, that are not only jazzy, we've done all sorts of things which are a wonder for anybody participating in the chorale to have a new experience that's so different and so varied, and it's not just one type of music. It's the complexity of the music that's so endearing and so wonderful when it's taught so effectively.
• [00:19:22] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: Yet, I want to just point out the one song that in its simplicity, deserves mentioned because it is a successful, simple statement. "Give Me Jesus," which is just a hair removed from a gospel song, but "Give Me Jesus" as arranged by Charles Lloyd is a masterwork. At the same time, so simple that it took no time to learn, relatively speaking. [MUSIC].
• [00:21:10] JEFFREY PICKELL: And "Our Father," too. Another song that every time we sing it, every single person in the choir is moved. It might be just the way you taught it to us, but it is a moving, touching song every time. They all touch you in a way that you just don't expect.
• [00:21:34] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: Well, a choral conductor, Maynard Klein, once said to me, "If after you've sung a chorale, a choral piece, there is not a change in the temper and the pulse of the blood as it runs through your veins, it's a failure." I took that to heart, and I think it's still true. There are a lot of things that are choral compositions that make no change at all. You go into it with a certain attitude and temperament, and you come out of it with the same. But if the piece is really worth, you're taking the time to learn it, it's got to make a change.
• [00:22:07] JEFFREY PICKELL: When you see that audience reacting to you, too?
• [00:22:10] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: Oh, yeah.
• [00:22:11] JEFFREY PICKELL: Is there a single memory that just makes you have a belly laugh, so to speak?
• [00:22:15] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: Well, I tell you, rehearsal very often, when Bernard was with us, took on a particular non-communication that caused me to laugh. He'd do something in the tenor section. He'd say something in the tenor section, and it would cause the entire tenor and alto section and some of the sopranos to give a reaction, always positive reaction, and almost always humerous reaction. I'd say, "What did you say, Bernard?" He'd say, "Nothing."
• [00:22:43] JEFFREY PICKELL: I experienced that a lot from him sitting next to him for 20 years. Well, maintaining discipline in this chorale has to have been a major talent that you have.
• [00:22:54] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: Well, frankly, I've always felt that if you don't have some amount of spontaneous joy, even though it's short, a giggle, that it's not worth doing. If it's so serious, that it causes you to have a sturdy approach to it throughout the entire rehearsal, it's not worth doing.
• [00:23:26] JEFFREY PICKELL: That's the reason that Our Own Thing Chorale has lasted for 50 years because the humor, the tendency to care about one another, the attempt to perform at the highest level we're capable of through wonderful leaders has made us something very different than the average choir, something very special and something magical. Anybody who doesn't experience it has lost something that those of us who have will cherish for the rest of our lives.
• [00:24:00] WILLIS C. PATTERSON: To be required to renew these memories and to be challenged to explain the raison d'etre for the chorale's existence. I'm looking forward to the thought that there is no question, but what the persistence of the Our Own Thing Chorale certainly meet the next 50 years and hopefully exceed.
• [00:24:25] JEFFREY PICKELL: Thank you, Dr. Patterson. You've been listening to Talkin' Music, a podcast series featuring 50 years of the Willis C. Patterson Our Own Thing Chorale. Special thanks goes to the Ann Arbor District Library in partnership with their Fifth Avenue studios. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes when we will highlight members of the chorale from the 1970s through 2024, including interviews with a number of surprise guests who went on from their OOTC days to national and international prominence. We look forward to your sharing this musical journey with us. I am your host Jeffrey Pickell. Thank you. [MUSIC]