Something about his stint in the army as a 17-year-old spurred what he would write and put to music, a 20-minute episode that would be perhaps the most consequential event in his life, as events played out over the next several decades. Mylon R. LeFevre said in 1962 that “Without Him” (Jesus), his life would be negative in so many ways, but did he really know just how adverse his situation would become? As he reflected on his own words so many years later, he could sing them with heartfelt passion, looking in the rearview mirror at what had been his roller-coaster lifestyle. What had spawned the words he wrote at an army base (in Columbia, South Carolina, in the county of Richland, shown here) as a teenager? Let’s take a look.
Mylon Lefevre grew up among a family of gospel singers, a circumstance that undoubtedly planted the musical seed in his life from an early age and fertilized the soil that would bring forth ‘Without Him’. Mylon not only began singing and playing guitar as a child, but also moved around repeatedly during his school-age years, probably a product of his family’s music-industry-driven lifestyle. Consequently, Mylon’s experience in multiple schools – an average of a different one every year – was generally poor, including some time in a reform school. His aptitude for songwriting, conversely, did not suffer, though the song-poems he would write tended to make him a target for ridicule by his peers. Later, at age 17, Mylon had just recently joined the army, and was at Fort Jackson in South Carolina. His parents were far away, including on one occasion in Memphis, Tennessee, some 500 miles distant. Yet, that apparently had not stopped him from sharing with them a song that he’d written, one that evidently swelled their pride in their son’s burgeoning ability. ‘Without Him’ was in their gospel-singing tradition, so it more than passed the LeFevre family ‘sniff’ test. Mylon’s own remembrance of the song as a 20-minute gestation period, along with the words he penned, suggest this teenager was feeling a need for God during a rough few moments. Was it a tough day at Fort Jackson, where he was making less that $100 a month? ‘Without Him’, Mylon said he’d found ‘nothing’, ‘fail(ure)’, and ‘drifting’(v.1); and felt he was ‘dying’, feeling ‘enslaved’ and ‘worthless’ (v.2), if not for the Jesus he knew. Within a short time, Mylon was singing his inspiration before a gospel convention audience in Memphis, among them the sensation Elvis Presley, who would be the first among a hundred music artists to record Mylon’s creation. This instant fame and fortune set Mylon on an up-and-down path through the 1970s, a life that would include drug addiction and a consequent physical punishment that he had brought on himself. By 1980, Mylon had come to his senses, partly as a result of his own father’s renewed devotion to God some years earlier. Mylon departed from the rock-and-roll scene that he had entered as a result of his success, as part of his own turn back toward God, and formed a new band named ‘Broken Heart’ by 1982, a testimony to the genuine change he’d made. This change also demonstrated that he’d circled back to what he’d written as a 17-year-old – a guy who authentically related to what it was like to once be lost ‘without him’.
It was not unexpected that Mylon would sing ‘Without Him’ the night he was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 2007. It was like telling one’s biography, Mylon might have said, for he indeed had found out what it was like to be lost, and then to rediscover Jesus and all He brings to one’s life. Mylon could say what it felt like to be at a dead-end on more than one occasion. A dead-end spiritually, as well as physically – you can read all about it in his own words (see the tributetomylon link below). See if what he says sounds familiar…and then take the medicine that Mylon LeFevre finally decided to ingest, so many years after writing this prescription for himself.
See brief information on the song and the author in this source: The Complete Book of Hymns – Inspiring Stories About 600 Hymns and Praise Songs by William J. Petersen and Ardythe Petersen, Tyndale House Publishers, 2006.
See the author-composer’s complete biography here, and the song’s story: http://www.tributetomylon.com/biography.htm
Read about the author-composer here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mylon_LeFevre
See very brief author information and his picture here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/l/e/f/lefevre_mr.htm
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