>> This is James Newberry and I'm here with
Joseph Meeks on August 3rd, 2017.
Joseph Meeks, founding Dean of
the College of Arts and Professor of Music.
We're here at the Sturgis Library
at Kennesaw State University.
So thank you so much for sitting down with me
and we'll just go ahead and get started at the beginning.
What's your full name?
>> My full name is Joseph Donald Meeks.
>> And what's your birthday?
>> January 26th, 1940.
>> So can you tell me where you grew up?
>> I grew up in a small town in
South Carolina, Belton, South Carolina.
I was born in
the Anderson Memorial Hospital
in Anderson, South Carolina.
It's no longer that name.
They've changed it, of course,
as everything has changed. But that's where I grew up.
>> And what were your parents' names?
>> My mother's name was Sarah Verena Stowe.
And in those days,
anybody named Sarah was called Sally just about.
And so no one ever in
my lifetime ever called her Sarah. They called her Sally.
My father only had one name, Floyd Meeks.
All of his siblings had two names, middle names.
But I guess by the time they got to
him, he was the youngest.
So after eight children, they just gave him one.
>> They run out of names.
>> They run out of names, yes.
>> What did your parents do for a living?
>> My mother didn't work.
She was a homemaker.
She stayed home and ran quite a tight household.
And my father came from
the farm outside of
Belton in a little town called Honea Path.
And in those days when he was young,
they called it something else.
But he lived on a farm with his other seven siblings
and his parents and worked in
the fields just like people did at that time.
It was a very agrarian society
back in the early 20th century.
My father was born in 1901
and my mother was born in 1906.
One day he came to town,
which wasn't very big,
but it was called town, and he was entrepreneurial
and he started his own businesses
and in my lifetime had several.
And his siblings were the same.
They all left the farm and came to
town and opened restaurants
and used car places and finance companies,
floral shops, service stations.
So it was very interesting.
I think it was easier then if you
wanted to do something beyond
the farm or beyond whatever.
That the opportunity was there,
that you could just almost immediately
open a business, and he did.
So he was a real model for that.
And my mother was a model
for the work that a woman does in the home
in keeping the family together and
planning meals and all of those things.
They were a great team.
>> And you had siblings?
>> I have two siblings still living.
My parents had five children.
Two died in early years.
My sister died when she was five and
my brother died at 10 weeks old,
which is not unusual in those days for children
to die because medical science
was not what it has become.
So that if a child became ill,
sometimes they didn't know how to
diagnose it and that was what happened with my sister.
They were never sure what killed her.
So I have two brothers.
We were spaced rather distantly.
When I was starting to school,
my older brother was finishing high school.
So we had 12 years difference in our ages.
And then my parents
had another child four-and-a-half years,
so my younger brother.
I have an older brother and younger. I'm a middle child.
I'm not sure I have the middle child syndrome.
Some would say that I do.
>> I see. So tell me a little bit about your early life.
>> Of course, it was a small-time town life.
My father was working all the
time and I think that's what happens with people
who go out into the world to
start businesses and to make a living for their families.
So he left early in the morning
and he returned in the evening.
And, of course, my mother
didn't have the conveniences that you have today.
So doing anything like laundry and
cooking and all of that was much more labor intensive.
So all of that was always going on.
But it was a time when in the neighborhood,
you had other children and
no one worried about whether
you were going to be safe or not,
you just wandered off into
the neighborhoods and down the streets
and nobody came looking for you or worrying about you.
So it was a good time.
Games that you played were done with songs.
You played hopscotch and all those kinds of things.
So it was a simple life, very simple.
Very family-oriented.
We saw aunts and uncles and grandparents.
My grandparents lived on a farm.
So we would go there and spend a few days.
We'd go when they were canning and when they
were killing a hog and all those kinds of
things and eat good food while all of
that was going on with no air conditioning.
So it was a good life.
I had very caring parents and I'm very indebted
to how they dreamed for us and supported us.
They did not try to carve out anything.
They didn't try to make us
be anything that they wanted us to be.
They just were great models of what the core values were,
respect and responsibility, accountability.
So I was blessed to have parents who were so caring.
So we were nurtured maybe a little too much sometimes
because they maybe I
would think maybe held us really close .
So it was good.
>> Can you describe your home?
>> Yeah. My parents when they were first married,
they moved into a little rental house.
And then with my father
suddenly taking off with
the entrepreneurial aspect of his life,
they bought a little house on
Poplar Avenue with a little gingerbread stuff and
was that lilacs growing across the porch,
there was no garage,
just a trellis that went out
that they'd pull the old car under,
and then you'd walk up on the porch.
It had a fish pond with goldfish in.
So we had wonderful neighbors.
We lived there until I was six years old.
And then we moved to our house that was built in
1937 that my father loved this house.
The floor plan came out of
a magazine and someone else built it,
but he liked it and he
approached the woman and asked if he could buy it.
And so he redid the house
and so we moved to Anderson Street
and my mother lived there until she went to
a retirement home three years before her death.
The house is still there and I
have just returned from South Carolina and I was
happy to find out that they've been doing
some restoring and a family
has moved in to enjoy the house.
So it was a wonderful house.
I only walked down the street to,
we called it grammar school.
People referred to it as elementary school now.
So I could walk out my front door,
a half block, and there was my school.
It's now City Hall.
And so that was wonderful.
And then walk back home.
When I was in the sixth grade,
I was a schoolboy patrol
and then I was asked to
be chief patrol for a while, which was interesting.
And so we wore the little hats
and whatever and you had to put
the signs out on the road.
We didn't have that much traffic,
but we did all those helping people across the street.
But I lived in that house till I went to college
and my mother lived there until
she could no longer be in the house.
When I say Anderson Street,
it was the street that became
Anderson Highway that then led to the town of Anderson,
South Carolina, where I was born.
And the doctor lived across the street.
If we got sick, my father says,
just go over and see Dr. Martin,
he'll give you something.
[LAUGHTER]
So you just go across the street.
And Dr. Martin had
an office in the lower level of his house.
He'd fix you up with castor oil and
orange juice, and you go home.
[LAUGHTER]
That's the way it was done those days.
>> Well, tell me how you first got interested in music.
>> Well, my parents had a piano
that was sitting in the living room,
and my older brother,
I mentioned, who was 12 years older,
my father arranged piano lessons for him.
And he was very sports minded.
And for three years,
he took piano lessons from a Juilliard teacher,
but didn't have any interest in it.
After a while, the lesson stopped, after three years.
And so the piano was sitting there,
and sometimes friends of
my parents would come by and they would visit,
and I remember one lady,
she would always get on the piano
and she'd play and play and play and play.
And so then I would go to the piano and I do whatever,
but I just could not do what she could do.
But again, I go back to my father.
He wanted me to have piano lessons.
And I remember the discussion.
They would say, should we or shouldn't we.
It didn't and it didn't take the first.
[LAUGHTER] So will it work with for Joe?
And I wanted to do it because I was asking to do it.
So they held off a little bit.
But then my father went out and arranged my lessons
and he wanted it to be the best.
And so the teacher with whom I studied for several years,
did not have an opening at the time,
but she recommended a young teacher who had come to town,
someone who graduated from the same school she had.
And so I started my lessons with her,
but my father still wanted me to
be with the teacher that couldn't take me at beginning.
The whole town lovingly called her Ms. Floride.
And that was typical of the time period to call
people Ms. or Mr. And their first name.
So everybody in town knew Ms. Floride and
she had gone to Juilliard and
she had come back to that married,
come back to the little town, and started teaching piano.
So he went to her again and said,
I'd like for you to take Joe and teach him lessons.
So she said, well, tell Joe to come by here
and see me tonight after I finished teaching.
So here I am, little boy.
So that night my mother took me,
and we stood in her music room and she was towering above
me with this great big smile on
her face and she was asking me questions.
And she said, yes,
I will take you.
And she later would say,
you look so much like Chopin
I just couldn't turn you away.
[LAUGHTER] She kept a picture
by her bed all those years and she would show it to me,
and she said, look, you look just like Chopin.
But anyway, I started studying with her
and my goodness, what a change.
She was all involved.
She lived and breathed music.
And her students and making sure that they advanced.
So I started having one lesson a week,
and her music room had two pianos upright piano,
and then this grand
piano that had a canvas cover over it,
she kept to protect it.
So I would go for the lessons,
and I was practicing quite a bit,
and she was pleased about that.
It always pleased her when she had a student
that would do just what she said,
and I happened to be one of those students.
So then it was,
come back tomorrow for another lesson.
Come back this afternoon for another lesson.
So I started sometimes having
lessons every day, twice a day.
She was that dedicated to it.
But then when I advanced a little more,
when I would go in for my lesson,
and she would be teaching on the upright piano,
when that student would leave,
she would walk over to the grand piano,
take the canvas off, lift the lid,
the fall board, and she said,
you're going to have your lesson on this piano today,
which was Steinway.
That was how I was introduced to Steinway,
because I read it on the fall board.
Steinway Sons and Company,
whatever the title was at the time.
So I just kept advancing,
she started entering me in competitions.
And then she started planting
the possibility of my majoring in music,
and trying to get me to be more serious and
she was more serious
and she just got me totally involved.
Very much like,
if you saw the movie, Madam Suzoski.
She just absolutely consumes
you and planned your life, planned everything.
It would go and she'd go to
the bookcase and she would pull a book off and she said,
let's look that up and we read about it.
And then she had
a big Chrysler and then when I could drive,
she'd make me drive the car,
and here she'd sit on the side and off we'd go.
So it was a wonderful time.
I'm not so sure that we
even have that kind of thing much anymore.
But she was totally dedicated to the profession.
She graduated from Converse
College School of Music in Spartanburg,
South Carolina, and then she
had gone to New York to study at Juilliard.
And so she made the arts and she made
music such an exciting possibility.
The picture and the stories that she gave
you made you want to do this and want to be in that.
So when we were getting close to
my graduation from high school, I skipped a grade.
I went from the tenth grade to the 12th grade, again,
she was saying, you need to go on to college,
you don't need to stay here.
So we skipped and I graduated a year earlier.
In the meantime, I was doing
auditions to wherever I would go to school.
We had kind had it down to
Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina,
Florida State University,
and Converse College School of Music where she had gone.
So in auditioning, when I went
to Converse and auditioned,
It was quite a process in those days.
You applied, and the year that I went,
they had 125 applicants for the school of music.
Then they looked at everything
that you had and your abilities,
and they narrowed it down to 32.
And they invited 32 students
to come in audition and it went over a two day period.
But not only did you just play for them,
you had to take a theory test and
an ear training test and all these different things.
Then it came down.
They chose six finalists.
Well, I still felt so unprepared for all of this.
It just was beyond me.
So I told my mother after I had played that day,
I said, why don't we just go home?
There's no point in staying here with all
of these people who played and I
heard some of them and they're good.
I just know we're going to stay to the end,
until the afternoon and see.
So when they named the six finalist,
they named me as one of the six finalists.
So I said, oh,
my goodness, we've got to stay.
The faculty had judged up until that moment,
School of Music faculty.
But they invited Dr. Earl Moore,
who was the Dean of the School of Music at
the University of Michigan to
fly in to judge the finalist.
So we just finished this all day thing.
We had to be ready for an eight o'clock concert
where all six of us would perform.
And he would choose the ones to receive the scholarships.
So there I was in
the green room waiting to go out and compete again.
I did and it was successful and I was awarded
the Walter Spray Memorial Scholarship for
four years to Converse.
Dr. Spra had been the dean of the School of Music for
many years earlier on in the 20th century.
They had established an endowed scholarship in
his name and I received that scholarship.
So I was excited about that,
but there was only one little piece that was complicated.
Converse had historically been
a school for female students.
Over the years because they excelled in music,
they created a separate school.
It was a School of Music.
It was the academic school and then the School of Music.
And it was core ed, kind of.
They had a few male students.
The situation was that you had
to enroll at Walford College as well.
Walford is very close to Converse in the same town,
Spartanburg, live in the dorm,
take your academic work, and you then had to
go over to Converse to do all of your music,
which was very intensive.
And you've got to go back to
1957 and know what the world was like.
In 1957, having males on
a female campus was you were constantly being watched.
If you made one wrong little move,
it was just going to,
you know, for example,
if you went into the dining hall,
you were not allowed to sit with female students.
If you just suddenly wanted to
go and sit with a student, you couldn't.
You had to sit at a table that was the all boys table.
And at night in the music building,
even though it was three stories tall and you had pianos,
practice pianos on all floors and you could go.
A male was not allowed to go beyond
the first floor in the evening after 6:00.
So my teacher taught me
his lessons in an old house
that was adjacent to the campus.
So he started letting me practice
in his studio at night so that it
was away from the music building.
And of course, here I am again with Steinway pianos.
Steinway piano is everywhere.
So I'm seeing that name again and it's importance.
So after that, I said,
well, I won't go to Furman I won't go to Florida State.
This sounds so good. I'll come.
Even though in my mind,
this is going to be a little bit different.
One thing that was driving all of this,
my teacher, miss Floride had said,
you cannot go to a school that's not
accredited by the National
Association of Schools of Music.
You cannot go where there's not an Altinway school,
and she had all of these rules,
and at that time,
not many schools were nationally accredited.
Converse was a charter school.
They were received accreditation for in 1925.
So there were so many things that
led to that and the fact
that she had gone there. So I did.
So I lived in the Dorm at Walford rode a bicycle,
converse, back and forth. It was about to kill me.
Finally, my father called me up on
a Saturday and said, I've bought your car.
So come home this weekend.
So I went home and I had an old
1947 Chevrolet that now I could
drive from one campus to the other to save me time
because I was practicing my freshman year,
this is going to sound unrealistic,
seven hours a day.
I finally had to drop back from
seven and was glad to get in five.
But then once you finish practicing that many hours,
you still had to write that English essay,
that composition that was assigned,
history exam tomorrow because you had to take
all the core courses as well as all the music courses.
So I tried it for the first year
and I was really
concerned at the end of that year
that was this the right place for me.
So I went back for my sophomore year,
in my sophomore year,
I mentioned to my master teacher,
Edwin Gorshevski that was another reason I went to go
universe because Edwin Goshevski
was a well known composer,
pianist and was very
prominent and he didn't accept more than five students.
So from those auditions,
he selected me to study with him.
So here we were five of
us that studied with Edward Gorshevski.
He was born in 1909, died in 1992,
and was the Dean of the School of Music
from 1945 until 1959.
The model here was he
was the Dean of the School of Music,
teaching five music majors,
piano performance majors, and performing regularly.
So here I'm setting up another model of
what is very attractive.
Because my teacher all these years
in high school is saying,
you're going to have a performing career,
concert pianist and push push push for that.
But I felt that the environment was unhealthy for
a young man in a situation where you
didn't have the freedom to come and go as you please.
And it was just, you know,
if you went into
the dining hall and you just happened to say,
well, I'm going to break the rule.
I'm going to sit over here with these girls.
The dean of women would sit at her table in
the evening because everybody ate it at the same time
and just stare at you the entire time
giving you that look that you know
and then you would be they discuss it with you.
You had to wear a coat and tie to dinner.
You couldn't go in just in a shirt.
It's a different time.
And so I started
discussing with Edward Gorshevski my teacher,
you know, I really think maybe I should transfer.
You know, I think maybe this
is not the best place for me to be.
He didn't say, don't do it,
but he gave me reasons not to while,
you know, different reasons.
And he said, you know,
we'll keep talking about and thinking about it.
Well, lo and behold,
at the end of my sophomore year,
he announced that he had accepted
the dean's position for the School of
music at the University of New Mexico.
And this is kind of what youth we do.
We make decisions just impromp to, you know,
we don't do the background check. We don't do anything.
We just move, do
whatever we're kind of impulsive, you know.
So I went home, discussed with my parents.
They said, absolutely not.
My father said, No,
you're going to stay right where you are.
You're not going anywhere. And I kept some,
but this is what I want to do.
This is what I need to do because I want to
stay with my teacher and I want to
because I don't think the other teachers are quite as
good, we're not going to do it.
So a girl who was
studying with him and she was a freshman,
she decided she was going to
New Mexico to study with Gorshevski.
So I finally convinced my father that I should go.
So then he was on board.
So in September of 1959,
I headed out to New Mexico and Albuquerque.
We drove across the country.
She and her mother and
her piano teacher drove
down to the little town of Belton,
picked me up and we drove
across took us two days to get to Albuquerque,
moved into the dorm.
It was as if I had landed on the moon.
First of all, I'm out west.
There are no trees.
It's dry sand and it's 1959.
I moved into the dorm
and knew almost instantly
that this was not going to be where I should be.
So I gave it a couple of weeks.
And I was just miserable.
And then when I went to the music department,
I wasn't really happy.
I felt it was a step down from where we had been.
Again, I understand my teacher
taking the position because once you grow
up and you realize faculty and
people move from position to position,
and they're building their career.
And it probably felt as if it
could be a good career move for him.
It was not a good move for me.
So I called my father on the phone.
Those days we only had pay phones.
You didn't have cell phones,
and you paid a lot to make a long-distance call.
And my father was very much tight when it came to money.
You couldn't be frivolous with money.
So I called and I expressed that I was
unhappy and I felt that I should come home.
And he talked for a few minutes,
and he said, no, I shouldn't come home.
And I said, but I really think I should,
and the phone went click. He just hung up on me.
So I thought about it for maybe 24 hours,
and I decided going home.
So in those days you went to college with a big trunk.
I shipped my trunk back to Greenville South Carolina.
I had enough money to buy a Greyhound bus ticket.
I didn't say goodbye to anybody.
I got on the Greyhound bus and I left on Thursday
at 5:30 and arrived in
Greenville South Carolina on Saturday at 5:30.
And I thought what have I done,
but you just do it impulsive again.
I called my mother. She said, where are you?
I said, I'm in Greenville South Carolina.
I said, you need to come get me.
I just, Oh, my goodness.
So I went up.
She came up to pick me up.
We got in the car, and we started home.
It's about 35 miles away.
She said, what are you going to do?
And I said, well, I'll go back to converse.
She said, well, if you change your mind,
I won't tell your father you're here tonight.
So you just go to bed,
and when you wake up tomorrow morning
if you still feel that way,
then you'll stay but if not,
I'll put you back on the bus and sit you back.
So the next morning I woke up.
It was Sunday morning.
My father had gone to church.
I sat down in our den with
a chair with my back to the door,
and it was his chair.
I heard him come in from
church because I told my mother I wasn't going to back.
I came and walked down the hall.
He walked into the den,
walked up behind the chair.
He took his hand, started messing up my hair,
doing this and laughing.
I didn't get scolded.
He said, what are you going to do?
I said, going back to where I was.
He said, what if they don't take you?
I said, I think they will.
And so he never
ever in his lifetime ever referred to it again.
I think he thought I really learned a lesson.
I think it was a lesson well learned about being
impulsive and about making
decisions without really giving as much thought,
which was 18 years old,
you're doing things that you won't do later.
So on Monday morning,
I got in my car, and I went back to Converse,
and they were just registering.
So they said, okay,
that was different too.
And so when the registrar was talking about
what had happened during registration,
he talked about all the challenges
and the things that took place,
and then he said, and then we had Joe Meeks.
The special case. But it was wonderful.
And there was a very good teacher there, John Ericson,
he had wanted me to come study with him in
the very beginning and was a little
bit hurt that I had not chosen him as a teacher.
But we had gotten through
that and I studied with him for one year,
but I knew this still was not where I should be.
Lo and behold, I found out that Gorshevski is leaving
the University in New Mexico to come to
the University of Georgia to be
Dean of the School of Music at the University of Georgia.
I thought I need to get back to
the teacher that I feel is right for me.
So I wrote him, and he wrote me this form letter.
If you're accepting the university of your honor,
I'll be happy to take you as a student.
Sincerely Edward Gorshevski,
he always called himself Ger,
and faculty called him Ger.
Then he signed it Ger.
And at the side and I still have the letter,
he wrote, hey,
H-E-Y exclamation, which relaxed the serious part
and said, we're still friends.
So I proceeded,
and that's how I ended up at the University of Georgia,
finished my Bachelor of Music degree on time in 1961,
did not lose time,
and immediately entered
their Master of Fine Arts program and
stayed there two more years with Gorshevski as my teacher.
The student who went with him to New Mexico,
she came back to
the University of Georgia
and then a couple of other students
from Converse who studied with him there.
But they were so far along they did not
transfer in University of New Mexico,
came to the University of Georgia also.
So it was full circle.
We all came back together.
His secretary from Converse
came to the University of Georgia,
the Celest from Converse,
came to the University of Georgia.
Everybody came there,
and it was the place to be.
And so it was good for me
because I was in the right environment,
and I don't regret going to New Mexico.
I think that was a wonderful learning experience.
>> When you talk about this relationship
with him and this special fit,
what was it about him?
>> Well, there's another tie-in
that we haven't talked about.
He graduated from Yale University.
And he also had a diploma from
the Tobias Matthay school in London.
He had received outstanding reviews for his concerts.
When he was at Yale,
he studied with Bruce Simmons.
Bruce Simmons was the Dean of the School of Music at Yale
and a well-known conductor and very well-known pianist.
So all those years when I was thinking of Gorshevski,
I'm also thinking about and all of his students.
We're thinking about Bruce Simmons.
He studied with Bruce Simmons.
He studied with Tobias Matthay in London,
and he studied with Arthur Schnabel,
who was a great Beethoven player.
So we started to talk about
legacy and so it became very important for
those studying at that time that our legacy
went back to Brahms and
Beethoven of the 19th century and 18th century.
Because we felt we were getting a legacy
through all of these teachers that we
could just have all of
this teaching methods and performance requirements.
So that's the reason all of
this network thing starts to evolve.
Gorshevski was such a model.
He was the Dean of School of
Music Converse and then he comes
to the University of Georgia. He's performing.
They have a faculty trio of cellist and violinist,
and piano, and seeing him perform all the time.
And he was just an outstanding teacher.
And again, when you had a lesson each week,
you didn't have an hour lesson
as they do today because that's just
so restricted in the way we do it now.
Your lesson went for two hours and three hours.
And then he had a seminar for
just his five students
every Monday afternoon at three o'clock,
and you never got out before six.
And he would say, don't plan anything,
we will leave when we finish.
So we'd walk in at three o'clock,
and each of the five of us would perform for
the class and have a lesson in front of the class.
So we had that, and then we had him.
Then he hired a wonderful pianist as his assistant.
So, in addition to a lesson with him each week,
you had a lesson with her.
You studied the repertory
with him and a different repertory with her.
It was very intensive.
Nothing like that happens much anymore.
So then, when I finished the master's degree,
I went up to New Haven,
Connecticut, to Yale to study with Bruce Simmons.
He was still alive and still at Yale,
and that was in 1963.
And I went to my teacher's teacher,
which is, again, that line all the way
back to Beethoven and whatever.
And that was also a wonderful experience.
So I had lessons with Bruce Simmons.
So he was the Dean
of the School of Music until 1970,
'71, and I was there in '63 to study with him.
It's always been important for people who choose
the performing career to have the benefit
of studying with major teachers
who bring all kinds of perspectives to
interpretation of Beethoven or
interpretation of Brahms or
the technique to perform
certain pieces, Rachmaninov or whatever.
So it was a good time.
>> What were your goals at this point?
>> I had shifted in my thinking.
Having performed a lot,
I began to realize how lonely that world is.
When you go back to think
practicing five and six and seven hours a
day and if you went out to play a concert,
you're in a hotel or
motel and you're always having to think about,
I can't eat, I got to sleep,
I got to be rested.
Because there's a lot of pressure for
a pianist because you memorize all the music.
You're sitting on stage,
there is no music when you play solo piano.
You only do that when you play chamber music.
If I were playing with the viol
instant cellos with all have music.
So there's a huge pressure
of constantly memorizing music,
the fear of memory loss, a memory slip.
All of a sudden you are in the middle of
a Beethoven sonata and like,
oh, I'm lost.
And that can happen because it's all very complicated.
But my models, I'm
looking at Gorshevski and I'm looking at Bruce Simmons.
They're in administration, they're teaching,
they're composers, they're
conductors, and they're performing.
And I thought that's really what I'd like to be.
I'd like to combine all three of those things.
And then that became my goal.
And that's how I ended up.
>> That seems like an appealing model.
>> It was a very appealing model,
but I just felt that it was a realistic model.
For many points,
even financially, it was a realistic model.
Because artists, musicians, whatever,
if you choose the life of performing,
unless you make it really big,
unless you are a superstar,
super talent that everybody is wanting
you to record everything
and you're in demand on the concert stage,
you may start to make some money and you might
be able to find financial security.
But that's a risk because you don't know.
And you start to realize how many people are
talented and doing the same thing you're
doing and what the competition is.
It's just constant competition.
And I didn't really want that one single kind of stress.
All three of those things are stress.
But I didn't just want it to all focused in one of those.
I saw them making a difference in
their leadership with the things that they
put in place to give the best experience for students.
And that became appealing to me.
I liked being in the academic environment,
being with students and the whole learning part of that.
And so more and more,
it just felt like that's where I wanted to go.
It took a while before I got there,
but that's where I wanted to go.
>> We're at a certain stage.
So I just want to check in and see how you're feeling.
>> I feel great.
>> It feels cooler in here.
>> [inaudible]
>> I think there's some air filtering.
>> I think it may be a little bit. Yeah.
>> I mean, are you comfortable
going on a little bit further?
>> I'd go as long as you want me to go.
>> Let's proceed and
we'll see how we're feeling in a little bit.
So tell me what you did
after completing your education
at least at this stage. Where did you go from there?
>> I went up to Yale to study with Bruce Simmons.
I was not thinking about getting a job.
I was just studying,
finished my master's degree.
Got in the car, two days later went up to New Haven,
took the train into New York,
the express train, went for Shakespeare.
The Shakespeare festival there
in between New York and New Haven.
I'd go into concerts at Carnegie Hall.
I was having a great time.
And then I go, I've got to get a job.
And as luck would have it,
a girl who had just finished her undergraduate degree
at the University of Georgia
wanted to go back and get her masters.
And she had gone up to North Georgia
to Cornelia and Demers,
Georgia and opened a studio,
and she had a huge roster of students.
And she was teaching in the Demers School.
She was teaching in the Baldwin School, which is south,
I guess, would be of Cornelia.
She had a studio there in Cornelia.
And she was the organist of the Methodist Church.
And she contacted me and say,
"Do you have a job?" And I said, no.
And she said, "Would you come and take over my studio and
my organ job at
the Methodist Church while I go
away to get my master's degree this year?"
That's perfect. So I went there and started teaching,
took over her students.
In one of the schools, I had
a choral group of elementary students,
which was fun and taught in all those schools.
I would go there and give lessons,
individual lessons in those schools,
plus in Cornelia I had
my studio and saw most of my students.
And then I got really involved in the Methodist Church,
playing all of the Sunday services
and choir rehearsals on
Wednesday night and
Easter services and Christmas service.
Absolutely wonderful people.
They just welcomed me and embraced me and
I just had the best time.
And they opened a little theater
there called the Apple Tree Theater.
And I started playing for some of the productions.
Played recital there.
But in the meantime, I established
a studio down in Athens, Georgia.
So I'd go down to Athens,
Georgia and teach on Saturday,
drive back and do church on Sunday in Cornelia.
So I did that for one year
and it was a wonderful experience. I loved it.
But again, if you go back to that time period,
1963, being up in the mountains,
it was rather isolated.
In spite of people being loving and caring.
So I started making applications to go somewhere else.
I felt as if this was not what I wanted to do,
just sit and teach.
Because when you have that many students,
some of them care and some of them don't,
some of them practice, some of them don't.
It's not very inspiring sometimes.
So I started applying and low and behold,
I applied to Clark College in Atlanta.
Clark College was in
the Atlanta University System
or I called it Atlanta University Center.
And you had Morehouse College,
you had Spelman College,
you had Marsh Brown College,
which was over on at that time was Hunter Street,
and you had Clark College.
Clark College was across the street
from Morehouse and Spelman.
So I applied for the position at
Clark and this was in 1964.
And immediately, they asked me to come for an interview.
And so I went for the interview and met with
the president of Clark College,
Dr. James P. Brawley, a wonderful man,
and the chair of
the music department was J. DeKoven Killingsworth.
It was wonderful. I thought this was a great experience.
As you got to realize
that President Johnson had just passed
the Civil Rights Act in
July of 1964 and here it is September 1964.
So the history that was taking place around
The Civil Rights Movement
and what was going on in Atlanta,
it was just a very interesting time and
a very unsettling time as
any time you have
these transitions that are taking place.
I also had an offer at another college.
I thought, no, this is exciting.
This will be good.
So I accepted it. Not even
thinking about the fact that it would be questioned.
>> Really?
>> Really.
>> Not even thinking?
>> No. I guess just like when I went to New Mexico,
I just lived in a different world.
Obviously, if I accepted the position,
I wasn't thinking about
the questions that were going to be asked, I guess.
So I accepted it and then had to face the fact
that people are saying, "Why are you doing that?"
And with the whole Civil Rights Act
and everything that was taking place at
that time, this was transition.
And it was a turbulent time.
There was a lot of unrest and,
I think Atlanta fared very well because Ivan Allen,
I believe, was the mayor of Atlanta at that time.
And what Atlanta did and
keeping things from just going crazy,
it was a real model for other places.
>> How did your friends and family
react to you taking the job?
>> My father told me to go to the phone,
call them and say,
I was not taking the job.
My mother was not that type.
She was too caring [LAUGHTER] to do that.
Friends of my family and myself from my town,
they were a little stunned
and wondered why I had done that.
But in most parts,
nobody said, "Well, we don't want to
see you anyway," except my father.
He didn't want to see me ever again.
And so my mother never said that.
And we would talk.
And finally, after a few months,
she said, "Your father wants you to come home."
So I went home and we talked about it
and he just felt that career-wise,
I was not going to be able to do
fulfill any of the dreams that he had from me, mainly.
So I think he thought I would not stay more than a year.
And so he said,
"You're not going to sign another contract.
Are you?" And I said, "Yes, I am.
I'm enjoying what I'm doing."
The faculty and the students at
Clark were very welcoming,
and I was having a very good experience.
And I saw no reason why shouldn't sign a contract.
To make a long story short,
I was there 11 years.
And things evolved.
Even in Atlanta where I was living, there were concerns.
When I was living there off
Peachtree on Peachtree Memorial Drive
moved into an apartment,
and the neighbors found
out that I was teaching at Clark College.
So their word got around,
they called the landlady who owned the building.
She called me the phone and told me I'd have to move.
I couldn't live there,
because I would be entertaining Black people.
And I said, "I don't understand this."
So I went to every door and knocked on every door
of all of my neighbors and looked in the eye and said,
"I understand you have concerns about me."
In every case, they all
just smiled and pretty much welcomed to me,
and it all just went away.
And I did not move,
and I had faculty and people to come over for dinner.
And so I only
lived on Peachtree Memorial Drive for a year,
because I didn't want to live there anymore.
And then I moved on to
another place as you do when you're young.
You go from one apartment to
the next apartment, or whatever.
But I stayed 11 years,
and that was a very good experience.
In the meantime, I left and went to Salzburg,
Austria to study at the Mozarteum.
When I got there, I
had a wonderful teacher at the Mozarteum,
and the teacher liked my playing,
and they wanted to
present me in an international concert.
And so when I arrived there,
I played the Prokofiev sonata,
and my teacher just thought it was great.
So they wanted to record it,
do a video recording.
Now this is in 1966.
And so why do they want to do this? Questioning it.
So I lived in a private home,
I had to walk to school,
cross the Salzach River to
get to the Mozarteum every day.
I had a wonderful piano,
but the studios had Steinways,
and they had Bosendorfer pianos,
the Austrian German piano.
I thought, "My goodness,
I just came to study and have a good time.
Now I've got to start practicing six hours a day again."
So I did because I had the performance coming up.
And so when the taping was supposed to be,
I did show up today, James.
When the taping came for
the Prokofiev sonata, I didn't show up.
And when I got to school that day,
he said, "Why didn't you show up?"
And I said, "It was raining and whatever."
He said, we're going to do it right now.
He took me right in to
the studio and the camera started to roll,
and I had to play the entire Prokofiev fourth sonata,
which may still be in
their archives in Salzburg, Austria.
Then I performed in the international performance
with a pianist from France,
from Greece, Austria, the United States.
There were five of us chosen,
and that was a wonderful experience.
>> How long were you there?
>> I was there for four months.
>> So you were. [OVERLAPPING]
>> It was a summer program.
And it was there during the Salzburg Festival.
I performed during the Salzburg Festival,
which has been going on for
years and years with all the major artists coming in.
I came back to Clark
and we were always again with this competition thing,
where I'm going to talk about
what led me away from Clark.
Spelman was very well-established in terms of music.
The Rockefellers had given lots of grants to Spelman.
They had all Steinways in their wonderful music building.
Morehouse across the street had
wonderful facilities and
the Morehouse Glee Club was renowned.
We were just a stepchild across the street.
We had no facilities,
we had no decent pianos.
But we were trying so hard.
And the whole concept that had been
created with the Atlanta University Center was to
bring all those schools together in
one place and not operate so independently,
but to be more collaborative and to cut out duplication.
Well, guess what? Doesn't happen.
Everybody was teaching.
Everybody taught music theory.
Everybody was aware we could have created
a music theory course and there could be other courses.
And students could have walked across
the street from Morehouse or from Spelman,
or students from Clark
could have gone across to take courses.
I didn't happen.
So the whole intention because Clark
started out on University Avenue.
If you go south on San,
there was a beautiful building still there that
was Clark University. It was called then.
So when it came over to the university center,
there was this competition,
everyone trying to outdo the
other and feeling like we're much better than you.
So I didn't see much future
because they had already wonderful established programs,
and I felt that Clark was struggling.
I was the accompanist for the Philmonic Society,
which was the Clark chorus,
wonderful talent, wonderful students.
We traveled by bus up into the Midwest and did concerts.
I taught piano, I taught music theory,
I taught all the courses.
But then my best friend
on the music faculty Bernard Hunter,
decided he was not happy and he decided to go to Fisk to
be the chair of the music department at Fisk University.
Things had become a little bit more
unsettling as we see ourselves now at
times when we have
unrest and it was starting to come about
again with the Black Panther movement
with my being white.
I received some letters that were not comfortable
for me and anonymously.
So I would go to my mailbox and
I would take out a letter,
and it would go sometimes
four weeks before I'd get the next one.
And it would be typed
all lower case letters telling me that I
was damaging their students
and I needed to go and if I didn't,
something bad was going to happen to me.
So it went on for a while and
I just felt so uncomfortable.
The administration started to feel uncomfortable.
They wanted to do everything to protect me.
So I thought, well,
I better start thinking
in a different way about my career,
about what I'm going to do next.
In the meantime, I decided that I would go down to
Georgia State and I called Ruth Duncan McDonald,
who was on the piano faculty,
and I said, "I'd like to talk to you.
I'd like to have a coach."
She was a wonderful pianist and played
in Carnegie Hall a couple of times.
I said, "I need to get, my skills."
I didn't have a good piano there.
I need to start getting prepared in
case I need to have my next career move.
So she said, "Oh, yeah, come."
So I started going down and playing for her
every week and she was wonderful.
And then Georgia State started
an artist in residence program.
And she said, "William Masels,
the great pianist recording artist who played with at
Atlanta Symphony is coming
to be here as artist in residence,
and I'd love you to study with him."
So I said, "Okay."
So first, I was just paying her
to coach me to get my repertoire back up.
And so he came and
the only way you could study with him is
you had to enroll as a student.
But you couldn't just enroll to study piano with him.
You had to take another course as well.
So I started studying and taking another course.
Well, after a while, I had so many courses,
and they at that time,
were thinking that they were going to have a doctorate.
So I even auditioned for
the doctoral program was accepted.
I had all these credits,
but they didn't go towards and they never to this day
ever have gotten a doctoral program in piano performance.
So I decided I might as well finish
up all the requirements and get another degree.
So I had the Master of Fine Arts degree.
So I finished the Georgia State degree with a master of
music degree in piano performance and did all the stuff,
the recitals and everything all over again.
And in that process,
I started meeting people
faculty students at Georgia State.
I was known as being a very good accompanist.
People asking me to accompany their recitals accompanying
Georgia State people which is what led me to Kennesaw.
A student at Georgia State, a wonderful singer,
had a friend in the community, Donna Angel,
who had graduated from Northwestern University,
and she was still singing a lot and she wanted
me to accompany her.
And she said, "I have a recital
scheduled at Kennesaw Junior College,
will you come and accompany me in that recital?"
And so I said,
"Yes." And here I am.
Of course, we have a lot to talk about about how
I then eventually came here to teach,
but Kennesaw was very small.
It was a junior college sitting in
a pasture because this was all farm line up here.
And so we played the recital,
and then they invited me to come and play a solo recital.
So I did that and that started to lead me away from
Clark and it moved
forward so that I ended up coming here to teach.
>> Well, to conclude this conversation,
I do want to talk about 68 at Clark
and culminating events motivated you to leave Clark.
And part of that being Dr. King's assassination.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
>> And I'm glad you mentioned that
because when I said a lot of unrest came,
it came with Dr. King's assassination.
And I remember coming in to the campus.
The music department was on
the lower floor of the building.
And as I came down the step,
a very talented voice student,
came up the steps and she always called me Mixi.
And she said, "Mixi get out of here.
The king is dead,
the king is dead,
you need to get out of here."
And I was just stunned by that,
not even thinking about danger or anything,
because I had not really
any bad experience except I had
started getting these letters.
So I thought, "My goodness,
Martin Luther King has been assassinated."
And so of course, the campuses,
everybody was just grieving. It was terrible.
So I did leave,
because they didn't think it
would be safe for me to be there.
Doctor King lay in
state at Spelman College and Sisters Chapel.
And I remember going and filing
by his coffin because it was an open coffin.
Of course, had glass across the top.
Sometimes people would have glass and of course,
with him and I understand that.
But it was a turbulent time.
And I think Atlanta
managed to get through without
a lot of terrible things happening,
but he was a catalyst for a lot of things.
If we go back to that 1964 when
President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act,
that established that nobody could be
discriminated against in public places.
And that meant restaurants
or hotels and motels or anything.
So [NOISE] it opened up those possibilities,
but still when you did them,
there was a certain amount of discomfort,
because it was not what had been.
So Bernard Hunter was
a faculty member and very talented man.
He had gotten his undergraduate degree
at Oberlin College,
his master's degree at Syracuse,
and his doctorate in Indiana.
Wonderful organist.
And he and I became great friends,
and we'd love to go out to lunch or to dinner.
We would go downtown to
have dinner or lunch at Stouffer's,
which was at the top of the mart on Peachtree.
Stouffer's was one of the restaurants who,
they started all in different cities across the country,
the top of whatever.
[NOISE] Opening restaurants.
The food was excellent,
and they made it very clear
that there was no discrimination, whatever.
So we would go there and we'd have a very nice lunch,
but did not keep people from sitting at
another table staring at us.
So you knew that you were a novelty.
There was a richest department store in Atlanta,
which was a wonderful department store,
and they had a wonderful restaurant
called the Magnolia Room,
and it was wonderful to go there for lunch or dinner.
And we would go there. Again, people were a
little astonished to see a black man and
a white man sitting at a table,
having lunch or dinner.
The restaurant at that time that
was on Hunter Street was Paschal's,
which is still exists today.
It moved over to Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard,
and of course, there at the airport and around.
But at that time, when I was at Clark,
it was then known as Hunter Street.
I think that's International Boulevard now.
With all the name changes, I can't keep up.
And they had a motel associated with the restaurants.
And it was the unofficial civil rights meeting place
for Martin Luther King,
Andrew Young, John Lewis.
All of these people who were
involved in the civil rights movement,
you would see them there.
And they would come there to have lunch.
Paschal's was the first restaurant to seat blacks and
whites together in the dining room.
Paschal's was established in 1947.
And so we went there often for lunch and for dinner.
It was very popular place.
It's later on the lodge
was given to Clark College and became a dormitory.
And of course, the restaurant part,
I think maybe is just I don't know if anybody has
moved into that or taken that over
because the restaurant moved to another place.
But it was the time we were living in.
And it's memorable times
and sometimes it was an uncomfortable time.
And not just for me
but for the Black faculty for Bernard.
He was always struggling
with those wonderful credentials,
this wonderful talent, and he would be
invited to St. Philips Cathedral
on Peachtree to play recitals.
He was so respected by the National Guild of Organist.
But again, just seeing what he
experienced in being in a place where it
was still not a comfortable environment to go
out and be in restaurants or be
a part of the city that
now is you do and go wherever you want.
So I lived through that and I experienced all that,
and I guess you could say,
I learned what it was like to be a minority,
because I was a minority.
The interesting thing with
all of the schools and the center,
they had always had an exchange program with
Smith College and colleges in the North
and students would come from there and spend
a year at Clark or Spelman or Morehouse,
and then Clark students would go to these schools.
So there was an exchange program.
The schools were established by missionaries.
Way back schools were more than 100 years old.
And it was not unusual.
There were white faculty and
Black faculty at all of the schools.
So that was the environment.
But in terms of numbers,
yes, I was a minority.
But you start to know what that experience is like.
We knew what that was like when we got on the bus and
had to ride all the way to our destination,
and we'd leave late at night
so we could sleep on the bus,
and get there, we'd sleep in the basement of
churches and mostly white churches,
then we'd do our concert,
we'd get back on the bus
and ride all those hours back to Atlanta.
There was no stopping.
>> That was a defining experience.
>> It's a defining moment for you.
And I guess when I took that position,
I took it with that in mind.
When we talk about conversation and
coming together from both sides to talk,
that's where I took the steps forward,
to be in an environment where I could
learn more about another race,
and to participate in that experience.
>> Well, I think this is a good place
to put pause for today.
So when we get back together,
we'll talk about your time at [inaudible].
>> We'll talk about how that transitioned.
[LAUGHTER]
>> Well, thank you very much.
>> Thank you, James.